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Working with Specific Colors

Lesson 5 from: Developing and Retouching in Adobe Lightroom Classic

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

5. Working with Specific Colors

Lesson Info

Working with Specific Colors

So you've seen that we can do that? Not only with skies and we've played with sky. And we've played with, uh, facial tones and retouching, blemishes and things like that. Um, but now we're going to talk a little bit about, um, the the process of working with specific colors, um, and and getting artistic looks out of things because sometimes it's not about a person's face. It's not about a sky, it's it's more about a feel. So I'm in the middle of a church here. Um, and in this circumstance, um, what I'm what I'm worried about, and I'm gonna reset this photo so you can see is I have to collect all of the data I possibly can, but this is stained glass window, and I've got to get the information in that stained glass windows. So I was very careful to make sure that I could recover all this information. So what I'm gonna do when I enter into a photograph like this is I'm going to initially choose the right, uh, profile. So I'm gonna choose a portrait profile because it's a limited. It's not...

quite is vibrant. And then I'm gonna take the contrast down and I'm gonna take the highlights down so that see, I'm getting that information back. The problem is that once you do that, you're losing the information over here on this side of the photograph cause you're also drawing down globally the highlights over here. So again. But the central figure of this is the stained glass window. And so I want to make sure I get that right first. So I come in and take the highlights down, and then I'm gonna take the shadows up so I start to get some information back in these walls. Then I'm gonna take the black down just a little bit, keep bringing the shadows up, and I'm gonna play around with the temperature so that I get the right feel. It is a warm shot, but I don't want it to be too warm. What kind of like the way that looks? Well, there's there's a ah, a case for playing. This is probably correct right here, but it really like the fact when it gets nice and blue. I like how this area stands out. So I'm gonna go with this more blue version of this photograph. Um And then I'm gonna add texture because that's really gonna help that stained glass window, A little clarity as well. And then I can take the vibrance up just a little bit, and that's even gonna pop those blues just so even a little bit more. And you notice that some of these lights here starting show up really nicely. If I zoom in here, stained glass is looking quite nice. So I like the way everything looks in the photograph now, Um, so that is the general photograph. But there's a lot more that can be done to the photograph, and that's why we're going back into our into our local adjustments and we'll start finishing the photograph there. So I'm gonna come into the brush first and in the brush. I'm going to, uh, double click the effects again. If you double click effects, it resets the brush. And then all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the exposure and the highlights up a little bit because I want to take the mid tones in the highlights up on this statue over here, and I'm just going to come over here to the statue and I'm just gonna just going to do this. I'm not even being really Ah, I'm not being super accurate. If you look at the overlay, the overlay spills quite a bit. But then I just come down to the range mask and click on here and I'm gonna choose. Actually, I could choose Limit luminous on this and if I just take the range up so that it's not doing anything to the shadows, I'm just gonna take the luminous up and are the range mask up until it is Onley dealing with the highlights on that statue there. And then I can change the smoothness so that it's more accurate or less accurate. And I'm just gonna keep going more accurate until boom. That's a really nice mask and watch what happens when we turn this off. See how this is before this is after it's it's making the statue glow. So it's getting all of that light coming from the It's coming from the position where the light actually Waas The light was already coming in this way and already cresting, you know her the edge of her, uh, of her arm and on her face. And so I'm just mimicking the same light by telling it I want to brighten this whole thing. But I only want to actually deal with where the sun is hitting her, and we're negating everything else. And so we can do a lot with this now. And we could actually, you know, re configure that and say, Okay, I like that amount of light, and I'm gonna take and warm it up quite a bit. Or I could cool it down. Who cooling down is and I'm really loving this. Okay, so I'm cooling it down, and that offsets her from the warmth around here. Um, then I'm getting jazzed about this photo. So now I can take a radial filter here, and I'm going to create a radio filter. And by the way, there's an invert option that you should be aware of. The radio filter has this invert option right here. And so if you create a filter, so if I just make a filter here like this, if you invert it, then the adjustment is inside the filter. If you don't invert, it's on the outside. All right? And so depending on what we want to do, and I want to darken up everything. And so I'm going to just go like this, and I'm going to increase size of this like and I'm gonna twist it so you can grab the edge and twist it like this and then increase the size of it like that. There we go. So I'm gonna dark and everything else up, but I'm leaving her and I'm leaving the window. So now I'm gonna go up to the top of this thing. I'm gonna turn off the mask overlay, and I'm gonna double check that and bring the exposure down. Actually, instead of the exposure, let's take the shadows, See how it's the shadows are affecting the window at all. So I'm gonna take the shadows down and even take the black down, so that's quite dark, and I'm also gonna warm it up a bit. So by warming that up, I'm actually setting her off even more so. I love the photograph. Now that's what it looks like. It's a beautiful photograph. Um, and because of burning and dodging, we've actually heightened the effect that we saw when we were at the at the place. Now, one thing I want to show you and and this is really important. In fact, this is super super critical. Um, because you hopefully you're saving time by using presets and by synchronizing your changes from women image to another when you're doing global adjustments. So hopefully you're doing that kind of stuff. Um, that will help you to give you time to kind of go into the images that are really particularly interesting and fun to you and that you really like, take those images and work on them mawr because you've saved much more time on the other one. So the amount of time I save on the bulk of the images allows me the freedom to play with some of these other images when I'm working.

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

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