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Color

Lesson 5 from: Developing and Retouching in Lightroom Desktop

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

5. Color

Next Lesson: Effects

Lesson Info

Color

inside of the color area. We have the option of changing the white balance so that it's just that these air just standard white balance. So if you use a flash, generally speaking, it's going to have a certain look because flash and daylight there kind of similar in there. Kelvin ratings. So they're kind of close to each other. But cloudy is much more blue, and tungsten light is much more yellow. And so where we have these kind of preset white balances. But if you use as shot, then it will just use the white balance that your camera specifically had. And generally, when you bring an image in tow, light room desktop, it's going to start as shot, and then you can apply a different white balance. You can also grab this white dropper tool, and the white dropper tool allows you to choose a known black, gray or white in your image in order to select what you think is the correct neutral tone. And so the only thing I can see in this entire image that would be a neutral tone is maybe her bag. S...

o if I click it, you can see that nope, that bag is actually quite blue. And so by neutralizing it, it made everything super warm. So I'm not going to choose the white balance to do my white balancing on this one. The dropper tool just isn't gonna work if I have a white shirt or something like that that I actually know is white. Um, then it usually works, but sometimes like this, there's just no place to actually grab that. So at this point, you actually have to do it manually and play around with how it you want it to look now a word about temperature intent when you're adjusting temperature intent, a lot of people feel like they don't do it very well, and they're kind of afraid of color that not very good at finding the color. And so the best way to think about color adjustments and temperatures is simply by thinking, thinking of it almost like focus. So when you're focusing your camera and your let's say really close to something and you're trying to focus in on something and you want to get that critical focus, you generally passed the focus and then you pass it again. So you're out of focus than your in focus, and then you go past it and you start to see it go back out. And that's when you know where. Focus waas so by kind of swinging wide and then getting smaller and your swings until you kind of narrowed down. That's how you find focus, and that's how you learn to see. Focus is bypassing it. And the same thing is true with temperature intent, especially with tent. If you swing to the left, you can tell when something's to green. You're like, Oh, I went way too far and then you go to the right and you're like, Oh, that's pretty bad, too. And so you just keep going back and forth until those swings get smaller and smaller and then, you know, Okay, that's the best position because green and magenta are both very ugly colors. And so the tent is the easiest thing to see, because if it's too magenta, it's wrong. And if it's too green, it's wrong. So it gives you an opportunity to learn just by going into the tent and swinging wide, and then just kind of move it back and forth until you go, okay, that's the right amount and then take your temperature once you've got your tent and then do that as well and just kind of play with a temperature intent. It's not ugly colors. It's more of preference. Do you want things cooler, or do you want things warmer? And usually there's a right area. It's, too. It's bad when it's a little too far in its bad when it's too far this way. But there's kind of ah, gray area in the middle that gives you kind of your preference. So I like the way that looks. And now I just need to choose whether I want to increase or decrease vibrance and saturation. And if you if you increase saturation, I'm gonna move into her skin here so you can see if I increased saturation, you can see that her skin becomes really orange. Looks bad. Eso saturation is actually quite destructive to skin because it kind of blocks up, whereas vibrance. If I take it all the way up, see how it doesn't get as bad on her skin now? We're never gonna go all the way with vibrance or saturation, but that gives you an indication of which tool is the more subtle, correct choice for a photo with people in it. If you have people and you want to have more punch in the colors, do it through vibrance so I can take the vibrance up. Don't do it through saturation. Saturation is best used with people going down because it kind of softens up the color. Um, saturation on landscape is perfect. It's fine. But on vibrance are for portrait used vibrance instead of saturation. And that is, in a sense, the color tools that you have, at least the basic ones. Now we're going to go into a subset of the color system, which is the HSE cells, or the hue, saturation and luminous. So when I click on that, the hue, saturation and lumens panel opens up, and that panel is consists of all all of the different variety of colors, and I can adjust each colors, hue, saturation or loom in its. And if I don't know which color I'm looking at, because that orange could be orange and it could be yellow. I can also use this target adjustment tool and I click on it and then I come over here and I just simply you can see the colors that are involved. And if I if I scroll up so I'm clicking on that and as I scroll up and down, it's changing that specific Hugh. Or if I was, if I wanted to choose instead of the actual color. If I wanted to adjust, say the saturation of that color, I come back in here, click on it, and now I roll up and down and it's getting the orange and the yellow, so I kind of nailed it. I was right. It's a little orange little yellow. But pay attention because you're not actually just adjusting the colors of that shirt that I'm pointing at your actually adjusting globally all oranges and yellows. You're bringing up the saturation of all oranges and yellows, which could be fine and could be dangerous depending on what you're doing. Usually if you want the best place to use. This is when you see a sky and you want this guy to just be a little bit darker. But you have a portrait. Usually you can go up and click on that sky and dial it down, so you just use the scroll on your mouse to dial down the loo minutes so you can go in and say I want to affect the luminous and click on that. Sure, and then dial it down and it gets darker. But notice her face is getting darker to it. Looks like she's got a really bad tan. So again, you gotta be aware that when you do this kind of thing, you're doing it to the entire photo, not just to one specific thing. So her sure is too close to her face to be able to use that adequately to do something right now. I could do green stuff, though, so if I wanted to take all of the green, which isn't much, cause this kind of a fall photo. But if I want to take all green and darken it up, I could either do that by rolling through the target Adjustment tool. Or I could just grab the green slider and say, I want greens to get darker and you can see her pants or getting darker. But her face isn't, but her sunglasses are so I can kind of play with those those three areas the grass, her pants and sunglasses. So that's the hue saturation. Luminous tool. It's a global adjustment still, but it helps to fine tune all of your colors, and so that, in a nutshell, is the color area inside a light room desktop.

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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