Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Developing Part 2

We're going to continue working through the basics panel and then plunged deeper and deeper into the develop module list afternoon so you'll see lots of powerful features now, right before lunch, I worked this photo using the basics panel in the light from three version in the Light Room four version. I want to do just a little bit more to it here in the light room four version. You could do the same in light Room three, but we worked through the tone sliders here on the right in the basics panel. I just want to continue down just a little bit to this presence section, so we have clarity, vibrance and saturation. Now, clarity adds some three dimensionality to a photo. It adds local contrast, which to me can make a photo look more three dimensional or a little bit sharper. But don't don't consider it sharpening from a fine detail perspective. We'll talk about that later, but I'm gonna go ahead and add clarity to this photo, and I'll just add a lot. So if you look at the photo so before,...

after it makes it look more three dimensional, it darkens the shadows. It brightens the bright tones and makes a look more three dimensional. So the light room for clarity slider is more powerful, so you will find in light room for that, you don't need to add as much as you might have added in light room three. You'll also notice that when you add a lot of clarity and light room for you don't get halos along the edges of things. So I didn't show it in light Room three. But if I had added 100 and clarity, you'd see a dark shadow along the edge of this balcony here in light Room four. Even with 100 unclarity, I see no shadow there. It's just another improvement in light room for So let's bring this down. That's something a little bit more reasonable and then come down to vibrance and saturation. Now vibrance and saturation intensify color. So as I slide vibrance up, you'll see that the couch and this guy and the trees get more colorful, and I can do the same thing with saturation. Now they work differently, and I'm gonna use another example in a little bit to explain the difference between them. But for now, I'll just generally punch up the color here with with either one. So if I look at the before and after with the y y key here, you can see how far we were able to come with this photo with just one of light rooms, many panels. So we've come a long ways. So let's go ahead and work another photo through the basic panel. I'm gonna go ahead and go to this photo here. It's photo number 16 for those of you here, and I'm gonna go out of before and after mode. Now, I could hit this single frame icon here, but the shortcut? Why, that's within my narrow band With of shortcut memory, I could fit that one in. So why will toggle you back and forth between before and after and out of it? Excuse me. Collapse the left hand panel for now. Now, this is my perfect exposure. Beach shot. This is exactly as it looked in camera and of course it looked like nothing on the back of the camera. But you can see over here on the wall if you look forget the camera over here that this is the result after working it. And it took about five minutes toe work the photo. So that's what we're gonna turn it into with just the basic panel here. Sorry to catch you by surprise. There. Okay, so I'm gonna work it in light room three first, and then I'm gonna work it in light room for so in light room to get it back to the light room three technology Because, of course I'm in light room for I'm gonna take this back to the old process version. So I'm going to scroll all the way down to the camera calibration panel and say, I don't want you to be up to date. I want the process version to still be back on 2000 and 10. So I see this exclamation point here, but I'm not worried about it. I'm totally fine using the light from three controls for this demonstration and then we'll go to light room for now. I can see that I have. Let's see, Let me scroll down just a bit here. Okay, We're in good shape. So for light room three, my thought process again is different than light room four. So make sure you're clear that that I'm demonstrating how to think about these sliders in light room three. So exposure sets the white point in light room three. So how bright the brightest tones in the photo can should be. Now, the brightest tones in the photo are already very bright. They're not blown out. The hissed a gram here doesn't go over the edge. Don't have any blown out highlights. So I'm just gonna leave the bright tones bright. I'm gonna leave exposure as it is for now and I'm gonna come down to set the black point or how dark the darkest tones in the photo should be. Now you can see in the photo that we the darkest tones in the photo, are still very light grey. They have a long ways to go to get dark. So I'm gonna slide the blacks slider up to dark in the darkest tones of the photo. But because the dark tones in the photo have so far to go to get to black, the black slighter doesn't do a lot. But it did, in fact, bring out some of the detail here in the foreground. Next, I don't have to deal with recovery because I don't have any blown out highlights. I don't have to deal with Phil Light because I don't need to bring light into the shadows. I certainly don't need to brighten up any shadows here. So those air kind of when I have problems when I have issues, I would turn to those sliders in light from three. I'm gonna come down now and work on the mid tones, so I'm gonna slide brightness down too bright to dark in the mid tones in the photo. So of course, all of a sudden, now that we have some darker tones in the photo, we can start to appreciate that there really is some some rich color here and a lot of information. The photo feels very flat to me now. Flatness is kind of lack of contrast. So I want the photo to be punched here. I want to brighten the bright tones of dark in the dark tones. And that's done with this contrast slider. So if I started zero now, I just slid the contrast slider up. I want to reset it to it's default. I could slide it back down to zero, but if you double click on any word, any slider name, so I'll double click on the word contrast. It resets it. So any slider double click on its name to reset it, So OK, so no contrast. Ah, 100 contrast. I like it with 100. So I'm just gonna go with the full 100. In contrast next, I could continue to fine tune the sliders. I'm gonna go ahead and come down to clarity here and add some three dimensionality and you're going to see that it kind of brings out the lines in the sand and the reflection. So So that's 100 clarity. That's zero clarity. Back to 100. So you can see it really does bring out that texture. Now, with light from three with a lot of clarity, as I kind of alluded to, you have to be careful that you don't end up with odd, harsh shadows along the edges of things that this photo is so flat to start with that I don't feel that I've really introduced any significant issue. But in light room three, be careful of that. And then I'm gonna come down to Vibrance or set and or saturation to intensify the color. Now, in a photo like this, I would just look at which combination of the two produces the better results and again knowing that you're gonna get a little bit more of an explanation of the difference between the two very shortly. And then I can hit the why y key to see before and after. So with a handful of sliders, I mean, it's just amazing how far we can come now. Of course, this is a dramatic example, right, But still a lot of work done very quickly. Now I use the y Y key or the Actually, since I clicked on this by accident, I'll show you the Y Y button. Here you can click on it to continue to cycle through different before and after views. So I often end up really just sticking with side by side. But know that you've got that that other those other options as well. I'm gonna click back on the single frame and I'm gonna show you how I really like to look at before and after, which isn't side by side. It's toggle ing before and after, on and off, and thats done with the backslash key, so US keyboards is above the return key. Think on UK keyboards. It's somewhere near the Z key. So back slash So before after. Okay, now, when you're in before mode, just a word of caution. A lot of your tools are not active, so I've often got betting before mode and not really realized it. And I'm in the spot removal tool, for example. And my mouse is not the spot removal tool. You know, it's like What's going on? Why don't I have the spot removal tools? Because I'm stuck in before mode, So we'll click on the spot removal tool, put it away, and they'll hit the backslash key to get out of before mode. And we're in good shape. Okay, so let's go ahead and work this now in the light room for process version. So I'm gonna go ahead and just reset it. That will undo all of my settings and update it to the new process version, so we'll start it from scratch. So we're gonna work this photo in light room for now. So again, my thought process is going to be different. I'm in the basics panel exposure in light room four is for the mid tones. So the mid tones, the average values in the photo are way too bright for me. So I'm gonna reduce exposure. And I'm just looking at the photo. I don't care what's happening with the hissed a gram and I'm just ball parking it. At this point, there may be fine tuning that comes later. The photo is very flat, so I'm gonna punch it up with some contrast. Might as well go all the way. And then I'm gonna work with the highlights and shadows. Now the highlights, the brightest tones in the photo here are a little bit washed out there, a little bit kind of dingy. So I'm gonna boost the brightness of the highlights a bit. So I'll take the highlight slider and will slide it up. Now, at this point, I do look up with the hissed a gram just to see how far I can go before I start blowing out the highlights. So I have plenty of room here. It's really not a concern. But that's how the hissed a gram influences my my thought process. I want a dark in the shadows. I want a fuller range of tones in this photo. So I'll bring the shadow slider down, and I feel like I still haven't quite gotten enough punch to the photo. The dark tones aren't dark enough. Maybe the bright tones. I could brighten them up just a little bit more, but I want a dark in the dark tones further. So at this point I need to come down to my turbocharging sliders, the whites and the blacks, the blacks in particular, and I'll dark in the black tones by sliding the black slider to the left. Now, one nice thing about light room four that I forgot to mention is that all of the sliders here for light room four left is darkening. Right? Is bright ning with light room three? It was kind of a mix. Blacks. You went to the right to brighten, but others he went to the left. I mean, it was kind of mixed up, so they've reset everything. So that left is darkening and right. It's frightening. Okay, so I've got the darker tones darker, and I brought the blacks down. I might just nudge up the shadows a little bit to add some light right into here kind of a little bit of a compromise. Next, they'll come down to clarity as some three dimensionality. Now, if I go all the way to 100 on this notice, it has a different effect than light room for the math behind it is a little bit different, but it continues to bring out that texture, Um, in the sand and the reflections as well. Color wise, it feels kind of flat to me, too. So that's what I would just continue down to vibrance and saturation. No change in vibrance and saturation with light room for versus light Room three. And I'm pretty much back to the same point now If I looked at the Light Room three versus Light Room four, I don't know that I would see much difference other than maybe the effect of the clarity slider. In this case, I would probably see a little bit more detail in the clouds. Now. I didn't blow out the clouds in camera, so the better highlight recovery of light Room four doesn't really come into play so much here because I didn't blow them out. But still, I believe that if I compare them. I would see I would see more detail in the highlights. So zoom back back out here now. I don't know if you guys have noticed that all of the edges in this photo are darkened. Now, maybe that's a good thing, you know, it's it does bring the eye into the center to focus on the man. But, you know, I know looking at this, that that this is caused by my lens, my lens vignettes, the corners of my photo. It might. This is my wide angle lens. It also does other funds stuff that we're gonna have to fix. Okay. But whenever I see an issue like this, I just immediately jump to where I need to to fix it. So I'm gonna show you just a quick introduction toe lens corrections, and then we're going to get back into the detail of it later. So I'm gonna scroll down on the right hand side here, all the way down to lens corrections. And like the light one team has built in profiles for lenses. So they've actually measured for hundreds and hundreds of lenses. What flaws they have in terms of darkening the corners, distorting the photos with barrel and pin cushion distortion, um, and built these profiles. So if I enable profile corrections here by clicking on it, light room reads the metadata for my photo knows that it's my canon 17 85 and applies the fix. So if I turn this check mark off and on, you'll see that it, in fact, brighten the corners and fix the little bit of distortion in the photo as well. So there are profiles in here, built for many, many manufacturers and then within the manufacturers again, hundreds and hundreds of lenses. Sometimes I have to prod light room a little bit. I'll turn on, enable profile corrections, and it won't detect cannon. But as soon as I say Cannon, then it will figure out what lens it is. So give a little nudge if necessary. Now, if the fix was too much. So, for example, it brighten the corners too much. There's an amount slider down here just to back off on the correction or to go even stronger on the correction. So for both distortion and vignette ing, now I'll get into other aspects of the lens corrections panel. But again, whenever I see an issue like that. I just want to jump down and get it fixed so that it's not distracting me. And and also, you know, it affects my judgment about what to do to the photo. So So I want to get it fixed a soon as I can. All right questions on this at this point before I move on to another photo and going a little bit more into white balance and vibrance and saturation. So in terms of the lens correction, is it correct that if you had it, Is this a raw file? Yes. So if you had j pick the camera would have already done corrections for that or not. I don't I know that there's a lot going on in terms of raw files And, um, when's corrections is is the lens correction something in general you should do all the time or only when you notice that it seems to be heavenly Heavily vignette ing, for example. Uh, that's really just a matter of preference. Frankly, um, you can you can apply the corrections all the time to every photo that comes in with lens. You can even set those is the you can set a preset, but you can definitely apply lens corrections to J Pegs Wells Raw files. And we have, um, I have a question in the Chapman from MacArthur photo. Should you apply lens correction before cropping a photo? And will it apply to the entire image or just the piece of the photo that have cropped? Now the lens correction vignette ing is gonna fix the original photo, meaning that the original edges of the photo what I should say. So if I crop this photo end, it's something that did not even include those edges. And I hit enter and then I go down toe lens corrections. You're not going to see hardly any change when I turn off and on just the distortion issue, right, because what it's fixing is outside of the crop, but it's always looking at the original, So this is pre crop. We're gonna look at post crop vignette ing, which is to add a creative and yet to your photo, regardless of whether it's been cropped later, the controller commands eat a couple times few times to undo this, and there we go. And then Gen. Wilson photography says, what If your camera price profile is not built in, you can build your own camera profiles, and I can't think of what website to refer you to that. But a lot of these light room blog's will have posts on that you can. You can download them from the Web as well. Now. It used to be that you could only actually load them on your system through photo shop. Now, I don't know if that has been updated. So what I would do is just look for a current block post on building your own profile and then a question to questions that are related. Jupiter. Seven. Why? Why not do camera calibration automatically on import, and then a 2nd 1 that says from LR learner? That lightning queen says that leaving lens corrections on by default seriously impact performance is that What's your take on? I haven't experienced that myself as faras impacting performance. Certainly, if you're having performance issues, I would I would consider turning that off and doing that towards the end of your workflow rather than in the Brethren. In the beginning, a Sephora's doing it on import. You do have the ability on import to choose one preset to apply. We saw that in yesterday's class, but one preset is not gonna fix every lens that you have, right, So if you're only shooting with one lens, that's certainly an option as well.