Skip to main content

Postprocessing and Q&A

Lesson 8 from: Lightweight Location Lighting

Kevin Kubota

Postprocessing and Q&A

Lesson 8 from: Lightweight Location Lighting

Kevin Kubota

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

8. Postprocessing and Q&A

Lesson Info

Postprocessing and Q&A

what I'll do is go into my light room did he pre sets here and here's one that I like a lot of creme de la creme from my um many art collection so that adds like a nice punch contrast cream ease up the skin tones okay there's before and after adds a little vignette around the edges and we've instantly made it much more dramatic and again talk about the white bouncy I want warm creamy skin tones if for skin tone was perfectly white balanced um that wouldn't feel right to me and I think in personal something we're going to know dead on accurate for shooting fashion for magazines or catalog work than the clothing color would be really important and the white balance becomes all the more critical but I'm talking about we're shooting portraiture we're shooting art stuff that's just for you and your clients so it can be whatever you want I could make this um you know what I'm gonna crop this type are unlocked my crop bring this down just a wee little bit okay I want to take out that little t...

hing on the top and also put her face closer to the top third we have our third crop lines here so generally when I'm looking for something in the top right on the third line is a point of interest you're talking outcropping images into thirds using the rule of thirds and these things out of the way there's information so there's how we would kind of finish up that image so let's just take one more last peak on this thing here bring back our sidebars we're going to develop mode shortcut is d and we could try a different preset says they want to try something that was mohr um funky vintage is called pre dawn return that to the original back to pre dawn um try black and white like the blacksmith maybe he's kind of nice crispy black and white but I'm thinking already my original first choice which was criminal a crim I was the one that I liked and I might go for a little more vignette ng so scroll to the right it might develop to the effects panel and take my post crop thin yet ing down just a little bit to bring down those edges but more of a spotlight kind of feel onto her face okay so there's our original and after the creme de la creme and a little more of initiating on the edges alright okay let's switch back before you finish up this segment and pull up those other images that we had from over here thank you sidney for right now that's great have sixteen to come in and since we've adjusted that one I'll tag that with three stars um when I'm editing one star means it's probably gonna be keeper and two stars usually bump set up to yes definitely I want to keep this on once I've edited and tweaked it a little bit three stars tells me it's already enhanced in light room with some of my effects here let's go back to one of these images here pick out which will we want so I'm going to take these four these last four which were the ones that I think we're probably in my running here and type in for multi up compare in brings him up side by side so I can look at them and decide which one I want to go with and from here I can either aiken flagged them like and mark stars or whatever I can zoom in by just hitting the space bar okay and goes back to the multi compare and scrolling over to the next one here and hitting the space bar I can have that one fill the screen for just type my arrow keys so was towards the end when we got it dialed in that's the one that I like there so I'll give that a one star rating and then we're gonna develop mode with that one that was the only one selected so now we're going to figure out what to do with this let's run over some pre sets about an acid wash with an auto expose acid wash kind of cool bolos out the highlights just a little bit on this one because it was really contrast to begin with so all we have to do now is take my highlights down here on the highlights panel on my whites down just a wee bit on dh over my shadows but the red back in the chair and I were looking pretty cool so that was uh what was that every watching what I just doing that one I totally forgot what I just did acid wash thank you acid wash auto so acid wash is like a a pseudo semi cross process punchy and also it brings out the colors a ton um as it is I might throw a little more oven yet around the edges but we've got a natural vignette ing already from the spotlight on the wall behind her uh there's a nice warm glow the light coming across her face following her nose we've got beautiful detail all there's creamy skin tones so the only thing I might do on this side I didn't use my lens baby like I wish I really want to kind of diffuse the bottom I don't want focus on the hands so much I wanted just on her face so I'll take that one into photoshopped with command e control on the pc and that takes your image from light room makes a copy of it and where a format you specifying the preferences pops it into photo shop ready for you to then tweak in photo shop and let's resize my screen here and photoshopped so here's our dashboard and photoshopped and what I'm going to dio is somebody asked earlier one of the images that I had had the edge is kind of blurred out so I do have an effect here called edge blur so I just type into my dashboard ej bee it's like a little search engine and now here have got my edge blur effects and then hit enter and it says reshaped the oval to match where you want it to be in focus pop that they're dragged that around that hit enter and literate okay so now we have a nice soft gradual just look towards the edges in the bottom of the chair goes out soften your hands a little bit soft in the wall just a little bit and the point of this is really to be a subtle um bring the focus right to that face all right so we've taken the edge off well you're I tends to get distracted by little details and then gradually brought it in it's still this is the original here but now we have the edge is slightly also looks kinda like a tilt shift thing without so you don't have your lens or you couldn't quite shoot it right or you want to control it more this sometimes will do the trick so there's a finished now I'm gonna put in a border on here just to finish this off so I use my borders and textures and let's say one of those sloppy border so take a thin sloppy and put a nice little key line one like that choose that one you can see what they look like beforehand pop that sucker on there and we have a nice little sloppy border finish and they want to turn it around or inverted we have black with a white sort of a key line sloppy edge and theirs are finished image ready to go back into my slideshow in light room so to put it back in light room command w control w it's going to say do you want to save it you just say yes and because light room created this copy to begin with it's tracking it and I go backto light room and there you can see in my thumbnails there's the edited version alongside the unedited or un cool version and I was type s to stack and now I have only my cool edited version with the original stacked behind it okay so weaken look at these here together unstaffed them go back to my original here and if I was to return that original back to its full original version that I could see they were ok for a finished version in the original version it's a little bit of punch to the color we can see we opened up the detail on her dress the lace here in the black soften the edges a little bit distracting this detail here softened that I warmed it up her hair is a little more golden glowing now and putting the nice to the border to frame it out all right let's take one last image here ah let's say of these that we had I'll take these three compare which one I want to go with and I'm thinking I love this smile right here that's beautiful so we'll take that one in the middle okay go to develop mode with that make sure it's the only ones selected for edit it on right here and develop mode we don't need to do a whole lot to it um so I'm just gonna take it into photo shop and see if there's any sort of retouching I need to do on her face and her eyes but um thinking it's probably pretty close but she's just got great skin and everything else so I command e pappas in the photo shop do we want to soften the edges a little bit maybe open up the dashboard and let's try it with an educator modified that up there matt down somebody just drag that right their inter submarine reason I'm doing this is just to keep your attention on her eyes that gorgeous eyes and I just want to kind of minimize minimize everything else so you can see it's a very subtle softening now of the surrounding edges attentions all in the eyes we'll zoom that thing in just a wee little bit makes your eyes they're feeling good here's the before and after that softening on the edges ok on I will use one called an eye color enhancer still typing e and my eye color enhancer tool pops up double click on that and it tells you to do slave size your brush just slightly smaller than the iris and dab over the center of the eye and that's how I'm gonna do all right so I boosted the color of the eyes and then I'm gonna change if I want to their capacities if it's too much color just take the opacity down we little bit here so let's go down about half okay good I'll finish it up with a little bit of a texture this time let's try an earth texture let's try bush so this is our borders and textures dashboard allows me to add additional texture into the image oh select grab my brush tool and clear that out so what I did was over laid a texture and then my action picked a brush blended it allowed me to actually paint that texture away from her face and textures everywhere else except for her face and her body well there's before and after edition of the texture love the grittiness it feels right over here kind of vintage old kind of a feel to it but we took it all off of her face the texture adds a nice little warm global maybe one half of that glow not quite as much saw type and color and there's a little option it removed texture color double click on that and now we have the texture color gone but just the texture and atonality there so it doesn't warm it up anymore just text arises it and gives it a nice contrast it punch all right so we'll finish that one up put a little border on it something nice and thin cherry bombs a cool one and one verdict and after this she was backto light room command w enter and saved there goes hot invert the border great question if you select the border layer and photoshopped um and then this hit command I for invert command I our control I found a pc okay so we got to take a break so I want to just do a couple of images real quick for you any any other questions there's are finished image back there in light room after all that I'll ask the question from sam cox who lives in loveland colorado this is kind of going back so you are adjusting your lighting looking at your lcd is that how you're mostly when you're on location yes okay and so the question was how do you do use any accessories that help you to see the lcd better when you're shooting on location yeah you bring that out of your bag of tricks you are rich in tonight very good church um I have this little hood man luke which I use when I'm outside if I can't see very well and this is fantastic special your eyes are starting to go like mine and he reading glasses but uh I just got to keep that with me when I'm shooting and that shows you everything perfectly so that's great to have if you're shooting outside or if your eyes are going bad but even not just t really see without having to zoom in and all that you can see about immediately if it's in focus or or what so great little um fenby one was wondering uh when shooting dupe any attention to the history ma'am especially if you're shooting tethered when it comes in a white room you were using to judge your exposure yeah we're shooting tether if your monitors calibrated and you know what you're looking at your monitor here is good then I would probably go born by the image but in a situation if you're not a hundred percent sure you're calibrated you're you're on a bright lit room and you can't tell exactly shooting quickly with cannon you can see on the screen as well as on the computer on nightline you can you're shooting tethered I could only see it on the screen here my computer so I have to go by the computer so definitely I'm gonna be looking at the history graham glancing over it to make sure that my highlights are way off the scale unless I want them blown but yes I would be glad to get instagram for sure do you guys have any questions you guys okay quick ones baby question yeah um the edges that another insert your existing ones yes the edge eighty is an insert for your composer pro on your camera camera uh those of you already have a lens baby composer or composer pro which is the body here that actually has the ball socket that such round the edge eighty is just an insert I don't have them a little too with me but you push it down and this this is the edge eighty part this goes into so you could buy this for your existing composer if you want the difference of the edge eighty um is that it's actually razor sharp through that plane of focus whereas the original ends baby was sharp in the middle but everything on the sides gets out of focus this has a full plane of focus it's really sharp this is a very sharp lens and if you kept it straight on without bending it then it functions as a totally normal eighty millimeter eighty five million year lens sharpe everywhere so if you didn't and you can lock it down by twisting the little bring here so lock it then it doesn't tilt on shift so if you wanted to use as a regular eighty boom boom boom it focuses manually it's only difference but basically everything is sharp but then as soon as you tilt it one way or the other then whoa everything it's happy it's exciting that yeah I have a question from diana brown photography who asked do you only use feed lights or do you ever use the quantum light I don't I don't know any of the quantum lights but the only other thing that I use besides speed lights as faras portable battery powered lights is the uh the one that we're actually giving away this is the b n h light trick this's awesome light on uh small compact come to the battery pack the single hundreds of shots and a battery and this puts out a lot of power and you can put on a reflector recon mounted to the octa dome that we're using right over there and this is a really nice little light it's digital control b makes little nice little bp which are like you know bb bb bb bb that's really fun so for lightweight location lighting used this light use speed lights use flashlights and use the lady video light those are the main four lights the things I'm okay and I have studio strobes you know white lightning's pro photo and all that but you're great for the studio and I have big battery packs that I could actually use and take those but I've started realized I never really need that much stuff I really could do with speed lights and these little things like this it's a lot less to carry okay um bunny age and many others have been asking we know that you you don't necessarily go directly by the numbers but do you pay attention what sort of meeting you're using or is that something you choose consciously like uh spot versus a valued over yes yep I'm generally using the value again I really believe and we kind of talked about this earlier too that the less you have to fiddle with your camera with you listen fiddler things if you use automatic like I'm shooting natural light beginning sections there were natural light was on aperture priority I definitely don't ever shoot a program oaks I want to control the look with my aperture then it's still automatic right you still have that control but I want to the aperture is always really important to me because that's the look of the photos what apple tree and pick to shoot it out and there's a big difference between shooting at one four and five six and I'm a programme mode I don't know I'm gonna get you could get five six I could get one eight to four to eight right so to me there's a there's a big difference and I want to control that and just as much automation by using aperture priority when I'm shooting with flash everything else we got to go to manual course but then I'm using a value to meeting when I'm on after priority value of meeting and I'm using my exposure compensation pretty frequently plus minus two thirds one third whatever just to compensate for backlight when we shot there with the window in the back the shots uh like that I knew that that window with threw off my exposure so I was up plus two thirds or so I'm explore your compensation in order to get that uh not to be underexposed in the bright window light ok we'll take one last question before we go to break this is from nsa from cyprus who asked you have similar actions sets and presets in light room as well a photo shop some of them are similar yeah I've tried to there's things you can't do and photoshopped in light room that you could do in photo shop so if they are if they are transpose herbal I've tried to create similar effects for people who really like one of these have been used the actions for awhile and I really like this looking they always asking if you have a similar thing for light room so there's some that air pretty close but a lot of times you just can't do the same thing so I have a vintage set for light room and a vintage set for photo shop and they're both have really nice vintage looks but they may not be identical

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Kubota - Lightweight Location Lighting.pdf
creativeLIVE Kevin Kubota Lighting Diagrams.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Karen Witter
 

I LOVED this class and I don't hesitate to recommend it! Kevin did a great job explaining how to incorporate additional lighting for on-location shoots and what those items would be. Then he illustrated those ideas for the class in various types of shoots. I loved the gear he recommended and especially his DIY suggestions. He has a great sense of humor and I felt like I was right there in the class. I would highly recommend this class to anyone who shoots on location and wants to make sure they're not only using the best lighting options but also the best lightweight lighting options.

Renata
 

I am enjoying this course so much!!! I am 100% happy with it. I just became a big fan of Kevin ! Great personality! Makes the use of flash a breeze. I just want to go outside with my gear and have fun now! thank you.

Maxx Walske
 

This workshop is fantastic! Kevin goes over every little detail you need to know for Lightweight Location Lighting. He shoots during the workshop, instantly shows the image and talks through how to see the light and make the proper adjustments for a fantastic image. He includes details about all his gear and post-processing tips, too! Kevin is incredibly inspiring! The course is easy to follow, fun and worth every penny!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES