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Editing with Lightroom

Lesson 15 from: The Lightspeed Workflow System

Kevin Kubota

Editing with Lightroom

Lesson 15 from: The Lightspeed Workflow System

Kevin Kubota

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Lesson Info

15. Editing with Lightroom

Lesson Info

Editing with Lightroom

Let's use something now. We're gonna go on her, and I'm gonna grab my digital fill flash and the key thing with all of these now, this is really important. When you save that preset, it doesn't save the brush settings down here. Those air independent meaning you can set those differently each time you use a preset and change them. So your brush settings determine how this thing flows when you paint on the image. And that's really important, because to make this work the way you intuitively would think you have to use certain settings, and what you need to do is set the flow. Like I said, down low 25 or so anywhere in that 20 range is pretty good. Make sure auto mask is off. Make sure your density is always up to and that is my pretty much universal brush settings for most every effect because it allows you to paint it slowly and watch that effect build. This happens intuitively how you more you paint them or it works. Okay, you guys, I'll see there. So here's that. Here are the settin...

gs that we're focusing on right now, and if you set those. They should stay that way until you change them to something else. So go ahead and set those in your life room. Now, if you want to and start playing with the presets that way. Okay, so now I have, ah, brush. So the other settings that we want to play with. So here is my brush on the image you can see now, as I'm scrolling my mouse, my painting brushes changing in size. And it's nice because you can just scroll up or down to change the brush size. The other thing I want to see the entering is the full effect of the brush. The outer ring is the feather part. So how soft the edge of the brushes. And I want my feather to be about 1/3 of the diameter radius of the circle. Adjust your feather size here. So know very little feather. We give you very hard edge and a very noticeable brush when you paint. If you keep that outer circle about 1/3 the inner radius of that circle then tends to work out pretty nice. Looks pretty good. All right. Once you got it set. Gory images decide where you gonna paint? A little light which might be right here in her face. Mr that little dot here. Okay, so I painted just little light on her face for or the dot is where you painted. So as soon as you hit that h on your keyboard or hide and show the air the dot representing the area that you painted, which is right there. So you think of these is like layers and photoshopped. Each dot is its own independent layer that you can adjust, You can tweet. You can fine tune independently of the other dots. If I want a new dot say, I want to work on a separate one and breaking up the wheel here in this image, I would go right over here to the right above my digital fill flash or says new. Okay, click on new, and then I can start painting again, say, on the wheels. And there's a separate dot their peers now with a black circle indicating that's the active working area. I click back on her face dot That's my active working area. And check this. I can go appear to my effect now, and there's a little arrow on the top right here that hides and shows all the other adjustment there and just focuses it on the amount of the total effect. And I can take that effect upper down from here. Thanks. See it changing on her face. It goes back down to zero. So anywhere in between here I could find tune that entire effect. That's a nice, pretty handy little feature there. All right, so let's that's dab a little more light when a data light on the Mustang logos. I think that's pretty fancy on the inside of her there on the dress on, and that's about it a little bit more. And then I'm gonna bring a little highlight down to her boots, just painting some light over the tops of her boots and then she's ready for photo shop. Now H will hide those old dots indicating where you painted that light. Okay, they got questions on that. So far, all right, Another thing we could do to this one right here, because this is a little diffused. The contrast is low on her face is I'm gonna create a new adjustment and do contrast paint with contrast. Okay, so select contrast. Bring my brush over the image here and over her face here. I'm just gonna paint just a little bit because it is kind of defused out by the back light of the sun. And now I've added more contrast to her face. There's our before and after all those little pain teas, just enough to bring the detail where we want it on the image. Okay. No one's ready to go to photo shop. Let's go back to our grid. Look at the other images. Decide what we need to do to these. This one here, I can tell already. I need to have a little bit of contrast boost on that one, de for develop mood. Okay, I'm gonna crank the entire contrast this image up. This is the global contrast right here on the right panel. My basic adjustment section. And then I'm gonna use my favorite tool, which is shortcut. Hey, Mary. God, they're afraid to save a minute. It goes into my adjustment brush. My last effect that I used is still there. Contrast. Brush. I'll take that and just hit it right over a face. A bit of her hair. Here and we're kind of just helping out a little contrast that was diffused by the backlight, which is hitting her hair. Just a little background on this lighting here again. This was a shot the other day. We shot this. It was cloudy is actually starting to rain, and you can actually see the rain drops coming down here. They're all kind of backlit. I see little raindrops there happening. So it wasn't Uh oh, this is a good one. We could do some quick retouching the raindrops on her face to but the whole look of the shot We try to keep it like a sunshiny day, which it kind of really looks like that because we through ah, speed light with road grid in the background here, pointing right at the back of her head, hit some of the trees in the ground and just blasted that sucker kept it warm and it looks like the sun back lighting her hair and lighting up the ground. When the whole scene, as you saw in some of the other shots with the scream here, it was just gray like that. There is no sun or nothing, so you can really manipulate your scene with the addition of a few simple lighting tricks. And I didn't use any light on the front of this one other than the the, um, backlight on her hair. So it was all just natural light on the front, so we weren't really simulate. Just a natural walking in backlight kind of a shot. So let's do that retouching on her face since we're at it. Okay, so let's go over to the develop mode Shortcut D and we already painted a little bit of contrast on here. And then there's a few little raindrops hiding her face in front of her face. So we're gonna go to our retouching tool shortcut queue for help me make up a good one for Q for retouching. Questionable junk under fake. Questionable. This is questionable. We need to get rid of it. So cue for questionable. All right, what? You come over, You have these two options Samos Voter Shop clone and he'll heels generally the one you want to use for fixing little things like this, or pimples or whatever. What's new in the latest version of light room is that you can heal in a line say like lines under the eyes that I'll show you a little more retouching on another wedding portrait image in just a sec. But there's little tip. A lot of people do this. They just click on it, which is what light room says. You just click on it and it finds a dot to use to hell which some of the times work. Sometimes it will grab a totally random, unrelated spot. It looks weird, right? So, um, the way I like to use it is to actually click and hold with the command key, and then you drag off to find the spot you want to use as the source to hell. That makes sense. And you let go. H is for hide, hide and show A junkie made okay. And then we can see that that raindrop isn't completely disappeared. And you know why? Because our opacity is set to 58% double check your pass. If you want it gone completely. Crack it 200. All right, so here's that will grab this next will spot called my command key. Click and drag to a clean spot. Let go. There's on her chin. Command key. Click drag to a clean spot and let go. Hi. The dots. There's 100 neck IPU click and drag. Governor, That one. This one last one right here. Old click and drag. All right, that makes sense. Everybody okay? Okay. And you're the raindrops we need to get rid of. You know, the rest We can keep. Okay, Good. Back to grid mode. Those images already, the others are pretty much ready to pass into photo shop. I'm gonna do a quick, little more retouching example for you guys just so we can see a full process. I'm gonna open a wedding job. Just have something little different. That's another images we can play with here. Let's try this one. Any questions on Internet while we're waiting that we you know, we sure do. We have a question from Morgan exposure wanting to know does. Does Kevin sell his presets? Yes. We have light room presets on our website. You guys concern Save yourself some time, use my knowledge to create them and for yourself. And they're cheap. So great Buddha image to inexpensive, inexpensive, worth every penny. I can guarantee that. Yeah, definitely. Sure. It's true. I mean, I think that I'm encouraging guys to experiment, learn, make your own. And that's part of the fun is making on presets. But there's a point when you got to say, I got to stop goofing around, Just used you stuff. It's already there. Um, and I've been doing this for 20 years and, you know, creating presets and actions for 12 15 years. And so I put a lot of experience into products build for you guys. Pretty cool, too. With those presets. They can start with yours and then modify and you recieve out is their own correct? Yeah, exactly. A lot of people do that. They'll use ours, and then they'll tweak a little bit here and there and make another one that similar out of off of that. So it's a good starting point, gives you inspiration or ideas for something that you might want to do as well, you know, mine or anybody's presets. There's a lot of great presets out there, but use them and make them your own, become if you like, or using straight as they are. You know, some of these I don't never touch because I just love him the looks of them. All right, So here's a little wedding, and, uh, we want to This the look of this wedding two is very similar. I applied one basic preset to the whole thing, and then we are going to let's take Yeah, that's the one I want to do. They got developed mode, and we're just gonna play with some of those retouching presets that we had just set up. When you're zooming, you may not want to go full full screen. And here's another little tip. Appear at the top left. You have a navigator, and you see these little icons that say 1 to 1. Zoom in a little bit, Phil. 1212 to 1. And the arrows will let you choose different ratios. So instead of maybe 1 to 1, you want 1 to 2, which is close, but not super super close. Whatever ratio is that you to you select will be what will toggle between. So that's gonna harder to explain. That is just to show you. So in other words, if I choose 1 to 2 and fit, which means show me the whole thing. Now if I z key you know, just toggle between those two settings. Z goes 1 to 2 z again goes fit. So that's really cool, because as you're working, you generally want to look back at the whole picture and then zoom in, start working on something. Zoom back out. Yeah, it looks good in the grand scheme. Zoom in, zoom out. But maybe you're working and you want full oneto one. So what you do is just choose one toe one click it and fit. Right now you're Z key toggles between fit and 1 to 1. All right, little known trick that we will relied. But if you think about it, it's actually pretty helpful to know, because you don't have to manually choose your ratio each time. Just know the ratios that you want to use for whatever is in front of you and toggle between them with a Z key. Right? So we will do a little retouching, but she on these guys here and yeah, All right, so first thing we're gonna do is go on over to our healing brush or the questionable spot tool remover thing, right? And we're gonna take down the lines under the eyes now We used to do this straightened Photoshopped because it was a pain in light room, but they've kind of actually improved it now so you can actually draw lines it with the healing brush right in light room and reposition them. So what we're gonna do is go on this line under her eye, click and hold and drag without touching the eyelashes just over the dark line. And you'll notice that it's gonna look kind of weird because light room is choosing a spot to sample from. And if I type the h key, you can see where it picked from. It was just not a good spot. So all you do is grab this and put it someplace that's more appropriate, like smooth skin right below her eye. Okay, then we're gonna go over to the other side and do the same thing. Draw a little line. It picked this spot, which is not good. I wanted to pick that spot right there, right on her chin, her cheek on and then I'll hide it. And then you're a pass ity slider comes in very handy here because we want to blend those. We don't want them to be just, like, completely Barbie obliterated. So I blended down about 60 somewhere on there. Okay. Select the other one here. Blend that one down about whatever it takes 60 or so. Okay, so now we have a nice softening of lines that look very natural, but it doesn't actually make them look like Barbie, which we don't want to do, right? We just want to take off some of the partying from the night before. Basically, because they always want they always want just to get realize. I want my lines removed. It softened, at least. So there is before and after lying, softening. And if you think it's too much softening, then just take your opacity slider and drop it down a little more So you find the amount that looks about right for you. Okay, so she doesn't have very much lying. She's young, beautiful lady, so we don't need to worry about it too much. Then I'm gonna go over to her friend here, and we'll do the same thing. Take a little lying down. It's sampling from her chin, which is not where I want. I want to sample from her cheek just below the eye and I go to the other I Same thing. It's sampling from over there. The light room. Stop it. Go on over here and we're good. Okay, So there's there there lines just minimized. Which is a very, very effective, very thoughtful thing to do again. Um, we're not gonna go in any Dove commercials here. I think that's abstract. Anyway, everybody wants their lines taken away, including me or reduced. All right, if you want to doom or we don't need to doom or in any of these ladies here. But just for example, we could go up to the other lines on the top of her head. Draw it, sample it from there, take this other one, draw it and sample it from there. And now those air minimized. If I wanted to do that one sample from there, we could do that as well right from there. Okay, then the next two we're gonna use is already to the line. So there's one more line is our little under the K tool. We're going to use our skin powder. Now. These this particular one, they don't need a whole lot of skin powder. There's not a lot of shine, and here there's not a lot of pores and things like that. But it's just this is powered on here anyway, So choose skin powder, make sure my brushes set down low 25 or so densities all way up. It should still be at. And then I just start kind of buffing out the skin here. So I'm gonna paint over areas that might have shiny spots, um, little small little micro lines and buffing it out and you'll take a look at the before it after where you can actually see it. So it builds up against slowly them or you paint them or it builds. So if you wanted to build faster, you just crank your flow up or slower. You bring your flow down. Okay? I'm just gonna dabbed. Adapted, uh, face. There's a little bit of a little wrinkly lying the smile lines. They're softening that, uh, you can see you guys see where my brushes at this point here. Okay, I'm just gonna go on duty to do you and painting around. Just kind of polishing buffing. Just like a little makeup artists would do Buffon's skin a little bit your brushes too big. You're gonna get a little tighter areas. Take that there. Okay, that's probably good enough. Okay, so there's before and after. The other skin has been kind of buffed out a little bit and smooth or an after. I didn't paint a whole lot because they don't need a whole lot. But if I cranked my density up, I mean, I flow up, I would have a lot more softening. So people are out in full sun. They got that shyness from the sun and oily skin that really helps. You might wanna paint a little more, but again, you want it to look natural, just at a healthy glow. That's all we're going to do. OK, this is 12 that we talked earlier does work on most skin color. I haven't come across up aliens with a really green one time we had an alien abduction at a wedding, and I figured you know why you guys are here. Can I just get a quick group shots of the aliens posed? We took some shots, but retouching them was a pain. So we ended up actually just cropping those aliens out of the shot it was it was not worth spending time retouching them. Okay, so the next thing we're gonna do is go to RK brush and use our eyeliner and the color boost so it's going to start with color boost. Remember that we talked about So just make your size your brush down and these girls have lovely colored eyes. There's a green. So I'm just gonna dab into the eye color area and give that a little more saturation. It's very subtle again, you know, wanted to look like they have funny colored contacts. On what? You just want to add a little little kick to it. We're gonna add a new adjustment, and this one's going to the eye liner tool, which we talked about. Take the eyeliner tool and check out that works. I'm just gonna paint over things that are already kind of dark, real quick eyelashes. It's gonna enhancing. There are liner, and you don't have to be precise because the eyeliner, tools Onley gonna work on things that are already dark. It's not gonna work on stuff like their eyes. So I just kind of boosted that eyeliner. And here's one more trick in classic portrait. Sure retouching. You re happy you enhanced the dark line around the iris that's already there to make the eyes kind of come out at UME. Or so if you in the old school days you send your your images out to have painted, retouch it by hand painted retouch er's and what they would do is after that, they would actually just darken the line. You can see that here, um, this line that's naturally around the edge of our iris. There's a dark line, and what we want to do is just to darken it further, to make the eyes kind of pop more. And this is again. This is a classic portrait jury touching technique. So we just take our eyeliner tool and rub that brush right along the edges of those lines. If you go, you know, if you really take it far, I keep going. You could just really make the eyes pop, but you want to go too far out of natural on right around the edge there. Okay, so we're just giving them a little bit of boost without making them look, Jack don't. So there's before. I mean, after and before Okay, so those girls are good to go, and I don't need to go to photo shop for that retouching because it really wasn't major. If it's minor stuff, you can do it right in light room. Say yourself a time and time.

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