Skip to main content

Effects Panel

Lesson 12 from: Developing and Global Adjustments in Adobe Lightroom Classic

Jared Platt

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

12. Effects Panel

Lesson Info

Effects Panel

I want to go into the grain and the effects panel. So first off, the effects panel has two things in it has untold holdover from a long time ago. So a long time ago, they had a, um before they have the ability to automatically remove, I think is before that automatically removed the vignette ing They had this post crop vignette. I'm sorry. They No, it was It was that the reason that they made the post crop vignette was that people were interested in using the vignette ing option. So they were using the vignette Ah, removal tool toe add vignette because they like the idea of adding vignettes. But the problem was that when you cropped, the vignette was outside of the crop. And so they added the post crop vignette tool in order to allow people to do artistic post crop vignette ing. Um, the problem is that it's still always around the edges. So it's a center, um centric vignette like the vignette always goes to the center. And so consequently, I never, ever, ever used post coffin yet becau...

se there's so many better ways to do it. Um, for instance, you now have what's called a radial tool. So this radial radiant tool allows you to do a vignette anywhere on the photo you want and centered exactly the way they want and give it the right amount of of, um, feathering. And so it's It's the perfect vignette tool, so I don't even understand why we have a post crop vignette tool at all. But it's there, Um, and it's just a matter of changing the amount, and it gets darker, but see how it's always in the center. I could go dark Aiken, go light, Um, but it's it's always in the center, so it's fairly useless because rarely is the thing that you want in the actual center of the photograph. If if you're finding that you're photographs, can always use the post crop vignette because the thing that you want to focus on is always in the center, you're probably not very inventive about the way you're shooting. So you you might want toe, you know, turn that up a little bit. Do something different with your with your compositions because you should be putting stuff in other places and so post crop vignette not interested in it, but there it is. That's how it works. Once you do this, once you add of and yet you can then change how close the midpoint is or how far away it is. You can choose how round or square the vigna is. You can change the feathering. Um, this is my favorite thing to do with post crop vignette is to actually make like a old timey round photo there. That's how it's useful. Um, so anyway, let's reset that and let's go to what is useful. And that's the grain. I love the grain tool. And the reason I love the grain tool is for this purpose right here. So I'm gonna show you a photograph of a girl and I'm I had grain on her already. So I'm gonna zoom in and you can see that her skin has some inconsistencies and some blemishes and things like that on it. And so I've already done a little bit of retouching on it, but I didn't go nuts with the retouching, and there's just there's just it's just needs some work on the skin. And I don't want to do all of that kind of work and especially people who are doing like, let's say you're doing a senior portrait. Well, a senior in high school has probably a lot of acne and stuff like that. You don't want to have to go in a room, move acne before you even show the photograph to the person to find out if they're even gonna buy it. Well, the grain tool is perfect because it allows you to add grain and thus add a disrupter in front of the image that keeps people from seeing wrinkles, blemishes, inconsistencies and skin. It actually Smoothes the skin, even though it's actually making it rough. So, um, and the reason behind that, simply that your eye is trained or your brain is trained to follow lines. So you are always following lines. Everywhere you look, you're always following lines, and a blemish is just a circular line. And so if you put something a crossed the line, your eye gets distracted and doesn't follow the line, so therefore it doesn't see it. So if you can, if you can. If you can break up enough lines, then you won't ever see the line that's there. And so grain just naturally does that because it's random pattern of disrupting lines. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into her skin and I'm just going to add some grain. And usually I like to start the green kind of in the 20 range or something like that, so you can see that there's some roughness being created. And then I like to take this the roughness. I like to take that nice and high because that makes it chunky. So a little chunk in the grain is good, and then the size is the size is going to be based on the size of the photograph. So if the photograph is gonna be printed big or small, it'll change what kind of grain you want. And also, if you have a 13 megapixel file versus a you know, 20 megapixel file, it's ah, it's a difference in the size that you need. So in order to do that, you just gonna have to play around with it and see how big the grain has to be or how small asked to be to be appropriate to do the job that you're trying to do, and it it softens up the skin so you see how here's without grain, you can see this line. You can see cause this is smooth and this is rough, and that's rough in this is smooth. But as soon as I turn on the grain, it's the great unifier, and everything looks a little softer, a little smoother, a little bit more even. You can also add a little bit of negative contrast, so a little negative contrast, um, a little negative texture in the basic slider area and then some grain helps to make skin look a lot more beautiful, especially for just the moment if you want someone to see the skin but not really pay much attention to it at a little grain in it and it unifies it. Plus, grain just looks awesome. I love green, especially on a black and white photograph or on, you know, an architectural like street photography. That kind of stuff. Love, grain, Lovett moments. So any time I do black and white, I am always adding grain to it. In fact, I almost I probably add grain to 90% of my images, uh, at a wedding, so just a little bit of grain goes a long way to make that image look deeper and nicer. Um, so that's That's the effects panel there. And it's it's a beautiful way to finish off in image with a little grain. Now, I want you to notice something about the way light room is organized. Light room has organized so that the most important things are on the top, and the things that you'd use less often are on the bottom. And so if I open up the basic panel, you start up here in the profile and then you go down to the white balance and then you keep so you keep going down and then you would end up going into from the basic. You go to the tone curves in the HSE cells and all of these things. But the way I like toe work inside of light room is I like to use the basic panel to do all of my basic work. That's the underlying image. The image itself normalize the image with the basic panel, but I very rarely want to go into these areas here. Instead, what I do is, I create looks. I create tools, um, here, by going over to the left hand side and adding presets. So if I've worked as you saw, if I worked on the tone curve and I've got a nice look, then I need to add it to a preset. That way I can simply adjust the photos here and then come over here and apply the preset. That adds the look that I want to that I've created over time. So never spend your time specifically working on things here with every individual photograph. That's just not a good use of your time. Instead, work on these things work for 10 or 20 minutes on the perfect tone curve and then save it as a preset and then use that preset often. But that means you never have to go back to the actual tone curve area. You just simply adjust the image, and then, once the images adjusted, apply the tone curve you want, or apply the green setting that you want or apply the interesting color tones that you've made or apply the whatever effect. The only one that's different from that is the lens correction or the transform. Because transform tool, you actually have to go in and tell it where the lines are on dso that that one, you do have to go down and use it. But in general, if you can get to the point where you're spending all your time in the basic and then coming over here to push a button to accomplish all of the style settings that you want to add to the photograph, you will get through that process a lot faster.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workflow in Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom Mobile Cloud
Adobe Lightroom Image Pipeline System
Black & White Preset Collection
Color Art Pro Profiles

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES