Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Part 1

(light instrumental music) We just finished our selects. Now it's time to do some editing. I usually start with my favorite photo from the shoot. The one I'm most excited about. So, in this case, it's probably going to be one from blue hour. There's some... camp scenes that I like but I'm gonna start with the blue hour ones. To save some time, I just go straight into the stuff I've already favorited it. So, to go even quicker, I can just click here and click R on my keyboard to go to rated. Show you like this. Bam. Enter. Done. Nine selects. So. I usually go and try to pick my favorite out of the favorites to start with. It's between these two I think. This one has more water motion. Also has a bit more foreground. But. It's.. the-- blurry, right? We can see here there's a little too much motion blur compared to this one right here. Which is far from being perfect but I just like the atmosphere in it. I don't wanna get bogged down by sharpness. So, let's just start with this one then...

we can see if we can finish it in photoshop and add some of these water moves into this one. So I just hit D because it's quicker. That takes me to the develop panel. I've got here the presets that I've done over the year and I'll just show you what they do and then we'll start from zero. So, morning glow. I put A's in front of some because I want it to be at the top of the list because it's alphabetical. So morning glow, very faded. The blues are... The way I like them. A bit... Almost turquoise. And, you know, these are pretty extreme then I tweaked them. Soft jewel valley has more of a film look. Works pretty well here, actually. Some from Alberta out in the fall. So I like to have version one and two usually just because they work for different scenarios. I like to tweak them so I look at my presets as something that's ever growing and always moving. And sometimes I start from scratch, sometimes I start with one. But if I start with one and I tweak it and it looks better, I'll just save it as version two. And that's what I did in this case. So we see version two is a little more... So we see version two is just a little more soft, gives more details in the shadows. Floe Lake, that's, this is, this was a sunrise scene where I wanted to kill the blues. So, doesn't work well for this. So I made Floe Lake for sunrise and there was a lot of orange and I wanted to make the blues a little more muted. So it doesn't work very well for this. Highlands, that's from Iceland. There's Julier Pass in the Alps. Way more purple. This one is from a night scene in New Zealand. Keeps good information here in the shadows. A little more green. This is from the Pyrenees which is pretty similar to the morning glow. Less highlights and... This one, also more purple and more information in the shadows. And wild fire which was for wild fires. For pretty bright scenes so just kills everything. Not good for this photo. Alright now, I wanna start over with this photo. So from the get go... I wanna get the blues So from the get go, I feel like it's a little dark. My screen is at... I like to have it two bars out of maximum in just daylight. I was told by one of my teachers in uni that that's the closest to paper. I don't know if that's true of not but I just kept it. So, let's do this. The white balance looks like it could be a little more blue. My goal, I wanna get-- I think there's a little more purple in the sky that I would want. So I like to usually use the picker here to see how the colors, what colors are in each area. So I can see that super blue up there. It's more balanced down here but there's still... A dulling of blue but I still think it has too much red in it. I'm gonna try to lower this. I usually start tweaking out the white balance and when I go to save the preset, I don't save that feature. Because that's gonna mess up my white balance in the next photo. But I usually start tweaking the white balance. Tinker with my exposure a bit. Some people like to type values in here. You know like plus point seven five because they wanna be super precise. I just try to go quick because I wanna be outside shooting photos. This is a histogram. If you don't know how to read one, there's tons of information on the internet. Learn it. So if I hist contrast it just makes it flatter. I lose information and colors. See how more rich it is when it's here? So how can I want to keep it at default or even just lower and if I wanna get more punch, I can play with this curves here. So contrast, just keep it the way it was. Actually I use J on my keyboard. That's just to show what's overexposed. So you can quickly fix it with the highlights if you want. But I don't think it's that much of a problem here so I'm just gonna play with it. Also shows you what's underexposed. I can see here that's no information. There's just dark pixels here. Gonna bring them back. Pretty easy with the blacks. Let's leave it that way for now. So. Our highlights are not an issue. Shadows. I'll bring them back a little. Alright. (mouse click) Tone curve. It's a fun one. So I just start dropping some points. I wanna get a little bit of fade just because I enjoy it. I wanna fade my blacks a bit. I like to use the L key to look at the photo on white. It just means light's out. So there's two of them. One, two. I just like to go full light. If your lightroom is not white, go to preferences. Appear. And you probably have black default. So, it looks like this. Not ideal. So I go to preferences... And just make it white. Alright. Now. (mouse click) A little more exposure up there. If it looks a little contrasty, that's fine. We can always fix that here in the shadows. Putting them out. (mouse click) Alright. And keep in mind that this is pretty tricky photo to edit because there's not much information but that's the ones I like. So let's go into the HSL panel. So, I rarely tinker with this section here of color, black and white. I don't use it as much as I'd like. So I just keep it to HSL mostly. So HSL panel. That's where a lot of it happens. I start using this little button here. You can drop it anywhere you want. So let's say I wanna affect my blues. I can hold and I can slide, I can drag with my mouse on my pad up and down to change the hue of it. And you see it's moving a bunch of sliders... At the same time not just one. So, it's a bit more destructive if you use only one of the sliders because it's gonna leave out some color and it's gonna make some funny things like some gradients you might see in the skies that look weird. Blue skies, it happens in blue skies when you tinker with these and it makes like this gradient effect when you export the photo as JPEG. So I just mostly use this one. To reset a slider, double click on it. Straightforward. So, trying to get a bit more peel out of my sky just because I enjoy it. (mouse clicking) Alright. Saturation. Same thing. You wanna bring it down a little. There isn't that many colors to play with in this photo. It's mostly blue and this bit of orange there. You know, we can quickly bring up more pop out there but not working too well. I rarely use luminance because it can be quite destructive. Let's see what it does here. Yeah, you know it makes... Not for me really. I'm sure it has its uses I just don't use it. Split toning, alright. That's where you bring those colors into your shadows and highlights. So, I don't use it all the time because I can get a lot of the little eye dropper tool we just used for the blues. But let's say our shadows looked a little too green. We wanna make them look a little warmer, more yellow or orange if we want. Go into the shadows, I'll just pick my color. Say I wanna make it more orange and, you know, bring some saturation here to see what I'm doing. So this is full on red. More orange here. Just really fine tuning. See what I'm doing. Nice little orange here, alright. So obviously this is like micro adjustments. You want your photos to... Age well. Withstand the test of time so I try to keep it minimal, really. (mouse clicking) Pretty dark photo so it's also affecting our sky a bit. You see it up there? Over here? So, I just wanna warm it up a bit. Alright, good. Sharpening, this is some of the default stuff that lightroom does. I'd use a masking so it doesn't sharpen everything. You can see here in the detail what it's doing. I wanna try to avoid sharpening noise. And this is a pretty noisy photo. It was shot at 300 ISO but using the masking tool, I'm avoiding sharpening the noise which is not something I wanna do. So this makes it a little softer on the sharpening. I'm gonna try to give you an extreme example. You see here it's like sharpening the noise? If I put my masking up there, it's not sharpening all the noise. But anyways... I would never play this far into the spectrum. Masking can be quite high but... I just don't sharpen too much in Lightroom usually. Kinda keep it close as about it was and play with masking. Alright, profile corrections. Sometimes I'll use it but for this, I don't think it's gonna be very well. In this photo, this is bringing out light out of nowhere in the corners and it's creating this natural vignette. I'm not gonna use it here. Sure, there's some lens deformation in the middle, barrel distortion, but I don't mind it. I also like to switch between some photos. You know like, I'll be working on this photo, I'm like alright it's looking good, I'm getting there. Then I'll move on to a completely different one. You know, campfire for example, and start again. And then I'll go back to this one and be like, Oh maybe these shadows have a little too... Orange and, ya know. So I don't consider it-- An edit is never really 100 percent finished. It's always working. So, just take a break and come back to your images. Even the next day. Here, another way to also bring different colors to your images. So, with this, I can achieve like super teal blues again. But it's being a bit destructive. See what it's doing? It's... kind of... Messing with my sliders up here. There's kind of both fighting for-- My hue sliders, there both fighting for the same thing. So it's not doing something super clean. But if you wanna... There's something you cannot get with your HSL, you can tinker with this a little. But here, there's not many colors to play with so it's not doing things we want to see. Um, alright that's pretty much my stage one. Stage two is graduated filters. This is where I can make more sections brighter or darker. Sometimes, negative dehaze works pretty well to make a sky still a little softer. And keep that almost, it's almost like mist into the top which... I quite enjoy sometimes. Um... If the foreground was pretty dark, I'll enhance that. If the foreground wasn't dark, I'll not mess with it with a graduated filter from the bottom but if I'm gonna direct the attention more to my paddler, just make this a little darker. Sometimes I'll make this smaller transition if I don't have much room. Or you can make it super long-- the transition between where it starts and where it ends here. You do that just by dragging. Bring it back up again, make it smaller. Alright. So usually here I'm just making this foreground. Just to remove distraction and make my-- put more emphasis in my paddler. But it's really about being subtle because you can see these a lot, ya know, people can tell. So be subtle. See, I can still see the line too much. Let's get back to it, make this a little longer. Go lower. I think on white, it looks pretty clear now. Good! Sometimes for some images, I like to bring the clarity down. I never put it up. I don't like what it does really. Gives this surreal look. So I even like to bring this down sometimes, you know, and throw a radial filter on my subject. That's just-- everything at zero mostly. And just some sharpness and just bring back some clarity on him just to put more emphasis. Also here, might wanna make... His light a little warmer. Try. Alright! Saturation, sometimes I'll bring it down. Here, it's looking pretty good. I think the blues can be a little more... Punch. Bring a bit more saturation. Then I can always balance here my overall saturation. Little more fade... See what's happening here as I bring my shadows down is that it's making this pretty ugly line because of my filter so I have to review it again to fix it. Then again I'll go back, bring it a little more pop. I don't wanna make it to bright because it was shot in pretty dark conditions so it's gotta be true to that. Let's go see this filter what it's doing. You know... I don't think it's doing much for us here. It's gonna be cropped anyways. (mouse clicking) (upbeat instrumental music) That's better.