Lessons

Lesson Info

Selective Adjustments in Lightroom

so we looked at on this one was pretty much adjusting the entire photo. So when I want to say now, it's how easy it is in light room to adjust portions of your photo. So to do that, we're gonna come over here and grab I care and picture. So she's right here and we're going to zoom in a little bit by pressing the space far in Turn off my clipping mornings. So now let's take a peek at a before and after so we can see what we're gonna create together in all Press tab to hide my panels on the left hand and right hand sides. So here's the before image and here's the after image. So we're going to do quite a bit. I'm not going to repeat the part about the exposure changes because it kind of just went through that. But what we are gonna do is go straight to the selective adjustment. So we're gonna paint a little touch of skin of lightning softening onto Karen's beautiful skin, and we're gonna pump up Oops. We're gonna pump up the, uh, brightness on the eyes just a little bit. You can see how ...

this iris is quite a bit lighter than the other one. And then we're gonna add the tiniest hint of paint lipstick. She would kill me if I put a whole bunch of lipstick on her. So I'm trying to honor Karen, so we're gonna add just a little bit of pink to that all very, very easily done in light room. So I press my space partisan back out. And now let's bring our panel's back and we'll press. Why? To turn off our before and after. Incidentally, the before and after controls live down here underneath the image preview. So if you forget that, it's why. Just a glance at the little before and after. And that's the keyboard shortcut. There's a why on it. So you can diss click it or and I also clues you into Oh, it's the Y key now, remember? So go ahead and tap that. So let's come over here in developed mode were already there were press the D key. If we're in library of you and what I want to do, I don't want to undo all of my changes, but I want to undo the selective adjustments, so I'm gonna come down here and I'll go ahead and take off the edge of in. Yet by coming down here to the effects panel and double clicking amount to slip those sliders back to the default. That's a real handy thing to remember, because sometimes you're like, Well, the fall isn't always zero. So what the heck was the default value, anyway? Just double click any of those field names and it'll reset it. Now let's come back up here to now. We're ready to start our selective adjustment. So let's come up here to our adjustments brush. So it lives at the top underneath the history and with the top of your basic panel, and you do have to click to activate the tool. And once you're finished with a tool, you also need to click to put it away, see how that little panel slides up and down. So this or this is all the changes that are relevant to the adjustment brush, and you'll see once I expand this, that it is the same set of settings that we have in the basic panel. So anything you saw over their exposure changes, clarity, contrast, shadows, highlights any of that stuff. Vibrance. You can paint it onto your image wherever the image needs those changes. And while you can do selective editing and Photoshopped, it's damn difficult. Let me tell you, I've been using the program for 15 years and I could make it get up on this table and dance, and it's still I would still do it over your light room. Rather, we're gonna find a shop because I like the outside. I want to go into the outside occasionally. So I like to work smarter, not harder. So let's go ahead and take a look at some of the changes that I painted onto the image up. Zoom in just a little bit more here. The second I mouse over point my cursor to the image. I see these little gray markers, little pins that let me know what changes I panted on previously. OK, so I'm gonna show you a little bit about this. We're gonna undo all the pins, and we're gonna do it all together. But I just want to show you a neat thing that you've got in another anything that you've gotten light room with any of these tools active right here. You get a special little slide down panel, notice these little switches. Actually, I've got him on all the panels. They let you toggle on and off just what you did in that one panel. That's very handy, because if we do before and after preview, we see the original image next to what we've done. But I don't necessarily want that. I want to see what the changes I made with the adjustments brush looked like off and on. So that's what these little switches do. So I'm gonna click that switch, and now you can see the original or what we did before the changes that I painted on So you can see the before and after Karen skin. This gets a little bit softer in her eyes, pop a little bit. We've got that just hint of lipstick there. So that's a neat thing. These little switches right here. If you want to zero out all of the changes, you didn't This panel you can click reset again. That doesn't undo anything else you've done to the image on Lee. What's in this particular panel? Does this reset button very, very different from this receipt? reset button down here. So as I mouse over to the image, I can see a pin in the case, the area that I made a change to now down here underneath the image if I turn on show selected mask overlay. If I click any of these pins, that's the adjustment. That's where I painted. So if I turn on show selected mask overlay than I always see, my paint strokes and your paint stroke show up as a red overlay. And that's handy to keep on while you're doing some of your painting. So if I click this pan, I can see Oh, that must be her lips And I can tell over here in this panel exactly what I did. But right now I've got this panel kind of collapsed. The interesting thing to remember about some of these tools in light room is that not only do when you click a tool, it expands a panel, but you can expand the panel within the panel. So to really see the settings I need to click this little triangle right here and now I can see all the different settings, and there's the pink lipstick that I added right there. So see how we got this panel when we click the adjustments brush. But we've also got a flippy triangle inside the panel that we've got two of them. So this particular panel has two different sections. So don't let that throw you If you don't see all of these different sliders when you click to activate the adjustments brush, take a real close look at the panel itself and make sure that perhaps that flippy triangle is You know, that section of the panel is closed because with those sections close, the panel looks very different and you're limited in what you can do with it. So just be cognizant of that when you're working with any of these tools right here. Just keep an eye on those flippy triangles so you can see here that I added, the lips signify. Click another pin. Let's I click this one right here. So now my sliders changed to show me exactly what I did in that area. Well, that was a negative cleared. Remember how I said that's a great skin softener? So that's really all I changed. Um, was that right there? And that was actually a preset. So now if I come over here and click on the pen that's on her, I then I can see. Okay, Well, what What changes being made there? Ok, the exposure is a little brightened. Great for brightening eyes keep going down. Okay, A little bit of a saturation increase. Interesting. And so on and so forth. So you can see exactly what you did today or a year from now to that image and get out of it. So, for example, if I decide I liked everything but Karen called me and said, you know, really, with the lips that come on, you know me better than that. Then I can click to activate the pin and see how now it's black inside of the pin. Then I just press delete and I get a satisfying puff of smoke. Unfortunately, I don't think there's audio that accompanies in, but you can make your own. So that's just to show you how forgiving these brushes are Really incredible. So let's go ahead and reset everything. So I'm gonna delete on my pan. So does click reset it again that just un does whatever it is that I did in that panel. That's probably the worst, grammatically, worst dramatic sentence I've ever made. Undo whatever I did in that panel. OK, so now let's create Let's go ahead and start making some of our change is going to go ahead and hide this little door over here by clicking the flippy trying also to get some more room. Okay, now we got our adjustment brush active. Now we're gonna check and see what kind of presets light room has given us, and there are a slew of them in here. So all I do is click the little Poppet menu next to the word effect. So these air all the different right here, the different presets, that light room has automatically these air just the sliders. So you could If I wanted to change exposure, I could click exposure. And that would really just be resetting these sliders back here. So six and 1.5 dozen another. Either pick the thing here that you want to change or just change the slider over here. I usually just changed the slider over here. I don't mess with ease, but these air, just like quick access to the sliders but the presets air right here, and they're very handy. So we've got a softened skin already in there from the factory. Thank you, Adobe. Look, we got teeth whitening, not exciting. So let's go ahead and click softened skin. And immediately, if you've got this top portion of the panel expanded and we do because the flippy triangles down, then you can see exactly what the presets doing. You're like, Oh, it's a negative clarity, but just a hair of sharpness. So with clarity, everything gets crazy soft, so add a little bit of sharpness back to keep it from getting so soft that it looks like a painting. So this is a preset, great learning tool. Go through these presets, you know, with your favorite beverage on a Friday or Saturday night and just look at the changes. And then that will be kind of like a learning tool to use, like, oh, for teeth whitening. What's happening? Oh, interesting negative saturation, huh? Maybe I wouldn't have thought to do that way. Maybe I would have up lightened the exposure just in the teeth area to make them brighter. But isn't that interesting that the preset drops the saturation is dead Great learning tool and that there's a 1,000,000 presets in the program, so that's a really helpful thing. So let's go ahead and go back to soften skin. Now we're simply going to come over here to the image, and you could use the panel to change brush size if you want. That's really clumsy cause you got mouth all the way back over there where, as I like doing it with either gesturing or a keyboard shortcut keyboard shortcut is your left and right bracket keys so the left bracket key goes down on birth size. See how the brush is getting smaller, smaller, smaller. And then, if I press and hold the right bracket, key gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. You'll notice two rings out there, the space between the two rings. That's kind of like the feathers owns. That's the transition point of the change and the pixels that are not changed so that you're so that there's a lot of hard transition between what you painted over in the pixels that you didn't paint over, which is a bit of a tell if you will, that who something's been changed in this image. So that's the feather amount, and I typically just keep it at that default. Another way to change both sides, like I said, is to use the slider over here on the right hand side and the bracket keys in case you can't find them on your keyboard. Ah, there next to the peaky. Doesn't Paul McCartney my favorite Beatle P for Paul? That's where Iraqis are. So now we can simply paint across our image. Now this is where it's really handy to turn on show mask, overly. That way you can see your brush strokes as you're making them. So now I can just paint. You don't have to do it in one stroke so you can release your mouse button, and I'm just gonna pain all around to solving her skin this a little bit. Now if I go overboard and I paint across an area that I don't really want to be softened, I could mouse all the way over here in the right hand side and click a race to put the brush in the race mode and then now all the way back over here and erase those parts. But that takes way too much time. Way too much time. You can put the brush in, subtract mode or erase mode with a modifier key, and it's option on the Mac or halt on the PC. See how in the center of the brush now I have a minus sign, so that lets me know and I can go up in burst size that lets me know that I wherever I paint, I'm going to be removing the change front so I don't want to soften her lips. I definitely don't want to soften into her eyes too much, but that's just a great way toe to use keyboard shortcuts to be a little bit faster with your painting. And again, we're not painting read on Karen's face. I can't imagine anybody that's tuning in on the Internet and thinking, Oh my gosh, what is going on up there? But this is just the over latest CR breaststroke so we can turn that off by clicking that. And if you if you mouse over to the pin, um, and leave your mouth steady for a moment, don't wheel it around. Then that mask overlay will automatically show for just a second while you point your cursor at the pin, and then when I move away from and it goes away so I'm not touching anything. But in a second, then that overly will come up. So that's really handy to see where you've painted. Now I can tell on my screen that Karen skin is a little bit too soft, so I could handle that in two different ways. I could adjust these fighters over here, or even easier, collapse the top portion of this panel and you get an amount slider. So if that was too much, I can simply drag it to the left. And maybe that looks more realistic to me. OK, so you're not going to see that amount slider until you collapse the top portion of that panel. So the way to get to the individual changes is to expand the top portion of the Palin. But the way to get to the amount slider is to collapse the panel that was probably between this and the dead gunmen menu system changing depending upon what module Lyman and in these like panels within panels, those are the two things that trips me up. When I first started trying to use light room. Everything else was pretty much OK. But those two things that really took me a little while to kind of get my brain around those two things. So if it happens to be similar to y'all, just keep those things in mind. So now let's say we're happy with that, and we want to add another adjustment. We want to lighten the iris of her. I Well, all we do is click new right here within this adjustments. Fresh panel. So we're gonna go ahead and click new. Now I'm gonna click that preset menu and see if there's anything in there that might be useful. My save leases. Sometimes she can get back into the outside, so I'm gonna click Iris, enhance isn't handy. Well, now I'm curious someone to see exactly what change that's gonna make. So then I would expand the top portion of my panel to see all the sliders, and I see Okay, we're gonna pump the saturation up a little bit and oh, little clarity. All right, I'm down with that. So now we can come over here. Let's zoom into our image by pressing Commander Control Plus and then If we press and hold the space bar, we can move around within the image water zoomed in. And for this one, I'm gonna make my my brush pre small, and I just want a paint on the colored portion of the eye. And if I can't tell the difference, all I have to do is come over here to the panel, switch itself. So there's my before now, granted, thats turning off all the changes. But I'm just paying attention to the iris right now, and then I turn it on and I can see Oh, that did so. If it's a little bit too overdone, what are we going to do? We're going to click that little panel to collapse the top or click the flippy triangle, and we can change the amount. There don't want more clarity, more sharpening or more saturation. I confess what it was doing. So it's almost like this amount. Slider is tied to those individual sliders, so it's kind of like bundling them up and the amount slider really changes. If you can increase or decrease the strength of all the changes you made with a single slider, and that's that is really as easy as it ISS. So now zing back out a little bit. Let's say I'm happy with that. And now let's do some lips. So we're going to click new again. Now we're going to create a new selective adjustment. Let's take a peek in our presets to see if there's anything in there that's gonna help us. And for this one, there's not really okay, there's no add a color preset in there. But what I could do is either choose color from this menu or simply come down here, expand that top portion of my, uh, handle. And then I can just come in here and reset the ones that were changed from whatever the last adjustment I made and all I really want to do to this one. So see, now I'm all my settings or zero, so I'm not gonna be changing any of these aspects of my image as I paint. But what I do want to do is come down here to color, and I want to click that little swatch right there. So I'm gonna give it a click and up pops of color picker, and now we're gonna pick some nice little pinky tone. I'd probably make it darker then I really needed to Just to see what it's gonna look like the first time I do that, I can always back off of it or change the color. So now it's come over here and zoom in again, President of space part to move around within our image. And these are bracket keys to change brush size and see how, as I paint on painting on that color. And that's something in again. If I go too far, then I can press and hold the option key on a Mac or Altana PC. And I can just paint back over the area that I didn't mean to paint across to begin with. Now, if I'm not happy with that color, I can simply click the color swatch there, and I can change it to anything I want. That's a little bit more saturated. You've got an opacity slider down here. It's really a saturation slider, but it kind of works like capacity. So if I want, you know, serious color that I could drive that all the way up. But I tend toe for caring, at least to stay somewhere down in the 30 s, 40% range. And I can experiment with a different color as I click. We don't want green lipstick or blue lipstick so you can click to change the color of the lipstick. Yes, Drink. What's the H value that you value three or six? What is that number relate to? So I can If I want to pick a specific color, Can I use that number to get it? Thats the value of the hue so you wouldn't have like, I'm gonna be great if you have, like, RGB feels right here. You could really dial it in. But you can't Really? Yeah, of a drag, but oven experimentation. I mean an opportunity for experimentation. If Ali confers up where you can drag the the eye dropper to like, say, you wanted her lips to match the flower color Yes, of your very smart. So what? Holly has brilliantly asked. No, zoom back out a little bit. Let's say we wanted the lipstick to match the flower color. Well, if I just mouse away from the color picker, then I lose my eye dropper. If you click and hold within the color picker then mouse over to your image. Then you can do it. So now I could pick up that exact color back off of the saturation of it a little bit to make it look, you know, slightly more realistic. So again, the question was, How do you can you mouse outside of this color picker to snatch a color that already lives in your image, which is really handy to do so? What you do is you click the little color swatch to open the color picker. Click and hold down your mouse button inside the color picker. Keep it held down, mouse over to your image and then release on top of the pixels. Better the color that you want to snatch. Very question. Detained, uh, brush from A to B. In this instance, it just allows you to have two different brush. This set up two different sizes. Like if you had a big brush that you used for big things, then you could have that as brush A. And if you had alluded E brush for, like, fine details and you could have that is brushed. Be so instead of having Teoh bracket, use your bracket keys to change brush, size and feather amount. All that kind of good stuff you could just switch from one brush to the other are the presets on it. It's not really presets is just It allows you to customize two brushes within this panel and the end. They stay set the way you set him until you change them. So it's not really a preset, but it just gives you access to two brushes. Yes, if I click on brush, be now. I can set up that size however I want, and it stays that way. So if I want to just set up, you know I could be was my detail brush and a was my my big brush. Then I would have to do is click over there instead of, you know, manually changing size and feather amount like that. So that could be handy. So that's really all there is to selective editing in, um, light rooms. Anybody have any questions on that on the Internet? Great. So hopefully you're starting to see now why it's so outrageously useful. I want to go back to the library quickly by pressing G for grid takes you right back to the library module in grid mode where you can see all your thumbnails. And I just want to show you another idea of something that you can do in the program. This image right here, I'm gonna go ahead and give it a click. I'm gonna press the space bar to enlarge it and then press Why? So that you can see ah, before and after there you so you can create a partial color effect in light room. So the way I did this one was I zero the saturation out on the whole image using the color panel or the HSE l panel right here. And then I came in with the adjustments brush set to 100% saturation, and you just paint to re saturate the area that you want to remain in color. In my personal opinion, this kind of level of detail is easier and Photoshopped that it isn't light room, but you can get it done. And that's probably only because I've been doing it in photo shopped for 100 years. But you can create a beautiful partial color effect here in light room as well. And again all I did was, uh I did not change it to black and white because that would not do the effect. What you want to do in light room is just drop the saturation of the colored photo and then come back in with the adjustments brush set to 100% saturation, and that will bring the color back in your image. And a lot of techniques like that recovered in light room essentials, which is a three day class. It is on sale, So I invite you to pick that up. It's really fantastic class. This is really just a teaser of the different things that you can do in light room cause we're talking about superpowers of all the creative cloud programs here. So I'll go ahead and go back to the or get out of my before and after and go back to the grid view and just one last word on the things that you can do with the selective adjustments brush that you can see here. This is a baby humpback whale that I was lucky enough to get. Look how sharp the water is being blown out of his air hole right here. So that selective sharpening. So anything you can do in the basic panel all of these sliders you can apply. You can load up your adjustments, brush with those sliders. So I just loaded up with with some extra sharpening and just painted it onto those areas so very, very amazingly forgiven. Now what I want to do is I want to show you how to create a preset. Okay, so let's go back to the library of you and let's find one of the Uncle George pictures that we fixed. Let's say that one right there now I can go to the develop module when? Let's say that I made some changes that I want to save is a preset. Well, while you're in the develop module, you get a develop menu notice, I said, when you're in the develop module, if I'm in the library module, where's my development? You you don't have it, so you have to be in the develop module to create a preset for any of these sliders in any of the panels that we've been seeing here in the develop module is you have to be in the develop module to create, develop preset. So once you get these settings like you like them. You can save them is a preset by choosing develop new preset My room asked you what would you like to name this preset and then asked if we like to organize it in a folder and you get those same set of check boxes that we looked at when we were copying and pasting the adjustments that we made So you confined to in your presets within an inch of their lives. But what you do want to be cognizant of is that when you go to save a preset light room captures the current values in every panel in the develop module. So in my own humble personal opinions, one would not want to do all of your exposure changes in contrast in highlights and shadows and all that on every single image. To me, that would be a very useless preset unless I always shoot under the same lighting conditions. So if you got a studio at home, that might be more useful for you, but shooting outside never gonna happen. But what you could do, like we said at the top of the class, is if you always find yourself bumping the exposure up a little bit, frightening the image. Then you would change just that one slider and then make the preset. So if it were me and I was gonna make a couple of presets, I'd open an image and I'd come down here and immediately click Reset that sets all of my sliders to the default of zero or whatever their default about you is. And then if I always find myself bumping the exposure up, just a touch and I always find myself bumping up the clarity. Let's just do clarity and vibrance. Let's say say it's a little bit of clarity, a little bit of vibrance Then I'd make my presets. So I go up here to develop new preset, and we might call this one, um, clarity, plus vibrance. And then I like to put in the number so 23 or whatever it ISS that just makes your precept a little bit more accessible. Name it something meaningful that what you can find it, and you don't have to try to remember what the heck that preset does to your image because it's in the name. So that's what I would do If I was sitting at recess and then you click create. And now where the heck do your presets live? Well, in the develop module, come over here to the left hand side and you've got a presets panel. So it's loaded up with all the built in process. Look at these things. There are turtles and gobs of these suckers. Look at all that hours and hours and hours of fun people. But you can't wait for the weekend. Can you like I know what I'm doing this weekend. I'm playing it light room. So all these different presets, or built in your presets that you create are going to be at the very bottom in the section cleverly named user presets. And see, there's our clarity and vibrance boost right there. Now I can access that on import, or I can apply it here in the develop module. So I would invite you to think about what you do a lot. Write it down, maybe and then think about creating presets for those. But do remember to reset your image because if I created a preset as we had it before, then light room would be capturing the values of all of these sliders, which is not gonna do you much. Good question. Can you reset the order of the presets? Can you? If you wanted to have your own presets be at the top of illustrated enough to scroll through all the other ones, you know, that's a good question. I honestly don't know if you can reorder these guys or not. I sort of have an answer to that one because it's it's alphabetical and new Miracle based on when your name in them. If you put like 01 and then name it, it'll come up to the top or something or a right. But it's still gonna be within the user presets section. But still it'll if it didn't order them within that by ever. So could you rename user presets clever naming Apple doesn't look like a top. I don't think so. My user presets were actually at the top. Are Yeah, okay, you tell. Appear in the top of my question. I don't know how I got them up there because I'm like, Why are you get the bottom? Yes, Rick, I've done a lot of editing on a photo and and now I want to create a preset on a certain part of that at it. Wasn't there an option there? I could just de select all the other ones and just select, like, the clarity vibrance and save it that way. So none of the other edits are in there. Yeah, that's definitely another way to do so. We'll go back to a shot that we have a bunch of changes on, like this guy right here. And so you can see over here in the basic panel. I've done a lot of different things. So now if I come appear to the development, you and choose new preset then aside from clinic clicking, resetting, zeroing out everything that I could just simply turn off the ones I didn't want to capture that that's another great way to do it. Just be aware. You know, just be aware when you're creating your pre says that light rooms looking at everything. If you don't want some of those applied, click the check boxes over here or just click reset and you might make your individual presets. I pretty sure there's way, but I'm not sure say you just did your color and vibrancy. You like that one? Is there a way to also set a preset button just to get rid of those two things you could you could appreciate? That's a negative. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We have a couple of questions that were coming in about some of these features here. This is from Donna from Baja. And she wants to know Lisa. Is there a way to clone out things you don't want in the image like you can in photo shop? Are you able to do that in light room? Absolutely. That's a great question. So I'll click Cancel to dismiss this dialog box in the develop module. The second tool is thes spot removal tool, and it has two different modes that you can use it in. So when I click the spot removal tool, see how we get another little drop down panel so I can either put the brush in hell mode Anil Zuman a little bit. The brush is by default in hill mode. I believe so. If I come over here and click atop the image, let's say I want to get rid of of this little spot right here. Then I could just click and light room gets rid of it. It shows me the sample point like where it's taking the pixels from to remove that item, and I can swing that around to make it look more realistic to me. Okay, so let me delete that again. I was told that puff smoke, so I grabbed the spot removal brush in the develop module. It's set to heal mode, which means there's gonna be a little bit of blending. It's gonna find some pixels adjacent to where you click. So, like I'm showing me where I clipped right here. And it's also showing me the where it's grabbing the new pixels from. But if you don't like the way it looks, or if you want to see if you can make it look a little bit more realistic, and then you can click and drag that sample point around, you know wherever you need to. OK, so that's one way you can do it if you don't want any blending. If you just want a straight copy and paste of pixels, then what you could do is put the brush in clone mode, so there's no blending with that So if I come over here to this image and I click, it's showing me where the clones coming from. But there's no blending going on. So depending upon what it is that you're removing and if the area in which you're removing has texture that you need to match or a pattern, let's say I take a picture of something on on wallpaper and I needed the wallpaper pattern to exactly match up. No blending. So that's when I would reach for the clone mode of the spot removal tool rather than the the healing mode and New and light run. Five. Let me go ahead and delete. That is the ability to click and drag with E brush. So let's say this isn't the greatest example of this, But let's just say that I wanted to get rid of part of this microphone right here. I could put the brush in hell mode, and I can just click and drag with the spot removal tool to get rid of something that way and see, it shows me where that sample point is coming from, and and if I mouse away from that, you can see that that portion of the the mic cord is now disappeared