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Develop: Treating Your Images

Treating your images, this is gonna have to do with the look of your images, and this is a definitely very personal choice that different people make. Some people go a little bit further, some people don't go as far. It's a personal choice about what you think looks good in a photograph. Within Lightroom, this is gonna be controlled in their Basic Develop settings, and there's gonna be a lot of little sliders in here that you can adjust for exposure, color, they do have a special tab that you can go into black and white if you wanna make for black and white images. There is a toning option, I don't do a lot of this, but if you wanna change the highlights and the shadows on their own to different colors, you can do that. You can add grain, or you can try to reduce what noise levels you have. You can also add vignettes, so let's talk about some of these. And so sometimes I will take a photo and only afterwards will I look at it and think, you know what, I think that makes a better black ...

and white image. Sometimes I see it when I'm out in the field, sometimes I see it later. It's better if I see it out in the field 'cause that might change the way that I compose the photograph. But sometimes you won't recognize this until later, and so then you can put it in the black and white mode, and then you can go in and make adjustments as necessary in there. In general, working with black and white pictures, you generally need to pump up the contrast. You need a little bit more contrast, you need to have some good solid blacks in there, so dragging that black so there are some nice pure black pixels in there, and it's gonna vary from image to image, but generally it's gonna have more contrast than a color image. Here's another case where I like both the color and the black and white version. I did do a little bit of a Photoshop fix, there was some unusual flare on the color photograph that I did fix up in there. I had to go into Photoshop in order to fix. These two photos will probably look identical, but they're not. There's just a very very subtle adjustment going on, and what I've done is I've gone in to the post-crop vignetting, and I've added just an ever so slight vignette to the right hand image. And if you look at the right, top right and the top left corner, you'll notice that it's just a little bit darker, and so what I'm doing by that is I'm, you're less likely to wanna look up in the corner if it's darker, your eyes will go more down to the face. And so I do this quite frequently with people photography, just adding a slight vignette. Some people do a really heavy vignette, and some people get really angry at one or both people who are adding or not doing something, and so it's very much a personal style and flavoring that you can add to your own photographs. And so there's a lot of different ways to treat your images for different types of looks. There's a lot of different classes here at CreativeLive, if you really wanna dive in in working with this in this particular program, just trying to give you kind of a quick overview of what's capable, so you know what to do when we're out shooting. There's some interesting things that can be done in Lens Correction, and some of this is gonna overlap some of the information that we talked about with the tilt shift lenses, and as far as the quality of lenses in the lens section. And so here's another situation where we have a curved horizon, and this is caused by a lens that has a lot of barrel distortion. Well Lightroom, and some other programs as well, can keep files on how much distortion a particular lens has, and you can apply a fix to it automatically within Lightroom to correct for these sorts of problems, and this is something that most people are gonna wanna have fixed, they don't like to have sort of barrel or pin cushion distortion in their photos. There's another type of fix, and when you are trying to shoot a subject straight on, but you weren't quite aligned just right, 'cause maybe you couldn't get to the right spot, or you tilted your camera a little bit, what we can do is we can fix this. And let me just go back and forth between these two, and you can see there's just a little difference, and Lightroom is able to see where things are lined up, and if you are trying to line something up straight on, Lightroom can help you out and kind of fix it up with a little better crop later on. Now here's a great situation for using a tilt shift lens, but not everyone has a tilt shift lens, but you can do it by faking it later on in Lightroom, and so one of the key things is if you know you wanna fix this later, you better shoot it really wide 'cause you're gonna need a little bit of extra space around the subject, because when you fix it in Lightroom, you're gonna end up squeezing the bottom part and you're not gonna have enough space here, and what happens is you can then constrain to crop so that you're not seeing any of that outside canvas area and you get a tilt shift corrected image without a tilt shift lens. Now of course the downside is that we have cropped in on our image, and we've thrown away probably half the pixels, and so that's the difference between the tilt shift and just fixing it in post, 'cause most of the things that you can do with the tilt shift lens, you can fake it if you're good, and this is one of those tools that makes it pretty easy to do, and that's for instance for fixing a parallax error. So there's a number of lens corrections where your lens may not be perfect, or you may have pointed your camera in slightly the wrong way that it can help correct for those things later on. Spotting is another way of fixing up little tiny problems that you might have with your camera, often because of dust specks on the sensor, ff there's dust that you haven't cleaned off that's on there, or if there's just some sort of distraction out there. So for instance, in this photo here, down in the right hand corner there is some dust that was on my sensor at the time and I cleaned it up later on, but in this photo, this is just not natural stuff that I can go in and clone out, and sometimes I get a little carried away and there's just a little piece of something floating in the water there at the bottom that just didn't seem natural to me, so I'm gonna go in there and eliminate those distractions. Now whether it's right or wrong to clone out that little stick that was in the water is a whole ethical debate that I don't think we have quite time for, but when they're your photos, you can do whatever you want with them. If you're trying to pass them off as natural history or journalism, there are certain ethical standards that it is expected that you will adhere to, and if you are trying to pass these off as absolute 100% truth of that moment, and you've gone in and you have altered that image, well you could potentially get in some trouble. I doubt that the police are gonna come and arrest you, but the photographic police are gonna hound you down, and there have been a number of photo journalists in the past that have lost their jobs and lost all of their credibility because they have cloned smoke in the sky to make a situation seem more drastic than it was. There was a number of cases where the Iranian government had cloned missiles to show that they had five missiles taking off when they really only had two and they were just simply cloning the other ones, and if you are a head of state, don't let your people clone these things out because the other countries notice it really quickly and it makes you look very very dumb. So you gotta be careful about those things. So occasionally images will need to be spotted out, and I will have to admit I have taken out a few birds, not in reality, but I've taken 'em out later because they were so small that you couldn't really identify 'em as birds and most people would suspect it was dust, and so I've probably done that to a few birds, I apologize. Noise caused by high ISOs, and using long exposures. When I say long exposures I usually mean over one second in length. There's a whole noise reduction section that you can go into, and this is where you, if you're good at working what you're doing, will be able to far exceed the capabilities of what your camera's built-in noise reduction system is, because that is something that most cameras have is automated built-in noise, but it kinda does a one fix-all on most all the images. Here you really get to tailor what your fix is according to the way that image looks. And so here's an image shot at 6400 ISO, which is a very high ISO for my camera, and you can see there's a lot of noise, and I've gone in and I've used the noise reduction system to slide the sliders around and make some adjustments, and to minimize the problem. You're not gonna make it go away, alright, there's going to be noise, it's just a matter of minimizing the problem. And so there's a number of ways to deal with this down here, we're not gonna get into the exact details of it, but you're able to go in, and fix up a bunch of the noise, and then control exactly the details, where you're gonna see the details, 'cause if you overdo this, it has kind of a reverse, weird look where everything looks like it's kind of plastic melting onto each other. It's a very odd look that doesn't look good so you have to be very careful how far you take things in that regard. So thinking about distractions, we try to avoid them as much in our composition but sometimes they're there, and there are things that we can do later on that minimize these distractions. We're just kinda toning down certain areas and highlighting other areas, and so there's a number of ways we can do that. We can do that by cropping our image into a slightly different manner, either cropping that aspect out, or so that it's making less of an impact. We can also use the radial filter, and the adjustment brush to either burn and dodge, lighten or darken a particular area. And so on this particular photograph we have a lead singer that is clearly the focus of attention here. One of the things that we can do to diminish the other areas of the photograph is by making 'em darker, and so if I add a little bit of a vignette, he has stayed the same. Let me go back, and all I'm doing is just darkening up everything except the lead singer in this particular photograph, and it's just a touch, it's barely a difference, just toning it down just a little bit so that your eye now more directly goes to that face. And so there's a number of brushes, the radial filter can be used. These are particular Lightroom filters that I wanna get into, but they both do kind of the same thing, but the adjustment brush has a little bit more customization 'cause you can add lighten and darken exactly wherever you want, whereas the radial filter is kind of a circular, oval area in just one place. But they both do essentially the same thing.