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Post Processing with Lightroom

Lesson 21 from: The Outdoor Photography Experience

Chris Burkard

Post Processing with Lightroom

Lesson 21 from: The Outdoor Photography Experience

Chris Burkard

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Lesson Info

21. Post Processing with Lightroom

Lesson Info

Post Processing with Lightroom

so now that I'm here I am good to go so what I'm gonna do is first of all I'm gonna delete these photo these folders just to keep it all consistent and so this is what it should look like just just um acting like we have our totally dialed finished thing you know there's no select there's no there's nothing like that's unorganized writes all completely organized so now that I have this child's fifteen creative live cool aerials arctic surfing waterfalls now that that's all done these air organized I'm ready tto edit them and prep them to send the client okay or to send to a magazine or to just saving my hard drives right not just for a client this is the process that I use for everything yes at what point do you clear cards off we've got a couple questions about soon is there on both hard drives I clear them okay yeah the worst what I find is that I love the concept of like saving cards the triple backup and there's been times where I've done that what I've had where I've been worried ...

about it or something but what happens most the time as you forget they're on there you go start shooting it's really good and I'm like I have two images what what's going on and then I I have to format my card I have to start racing stuff I just makes you go into like a world of hurt I feel like and so I typically as soon as I know they're in two places safe places I will back I will dump the cards or if I really wanted to triple backup thing I'll keep a separate card reader the card like wallet right that just has those cards that are not they're not formatted right and so I just I know just want to keep him separate I don't want to mix cards that air clean with cards that have information on them together totally is a good way to do it but I want to start to get the processing so basically the next step okay I've got all my images they're organized everything's dialed I've got all the trash out of there all of them bad photos and I've just pared it down in my favorite ones and I'm working off my download folder you can see it right now right um I take this folder the route folder and I take the entire thing from here in the light room okay so it's this is the download folder and light room k creative live cool um no photos found ok include sub folders awesome okay so yes it's including all of these image great um import wonderful and I want you guys to notice one thing about my light room um other than the fact that uh is is that over here I don't have a bunch of random folders in here there's not a bunch of folder smother shoots why because I've deleted them out because there's no need to keep that information just cashed in the program there's no need to actually use light room for anything other than correcting them and then once that's done leave my biggest pet peeve is like ah big unorganized mess and light room of photos that you've deleted and worked on in the audio diatta they can go in there and it could be color corrected and they can be removed there's no reason to keep your or your library organized in light room because if you're converting them to d n gs they're going to save the presets that you've made okay I'm gonna go through it and edit these images and I'm gonna warn you right now there's probably no rhyme or reason how I am editing these photos it's personal preference it's a matter of looking at stuff and just seeing what you what you what I like and bringing it back to the place that I can these air files from everything's there nikon files and these were nikon files there like sony file or sony files as well as all different kinds of cameras that I've shot with right so I will I'm gonna go through and just added a bunch of these products get through all of them but I but I just want to kind of show you my basic process now just to give ourselves a bit more of this screen I'm gonna um doing that I'm gonna basically take these guys down I'm gonna close this guy off so I'm kind of opening up my light room screen so you can really um see everything so what she worked on first well eyes your raw files okay so um I'm gonna go to develop right because I'm in library right now so I'm going to develop and I am going to start wise thing doing this so my little scroll bars down here at the bottom um and I could basically just sift through all of the images program is great you know there's a lot of times people use preset you conceal your information here um I don't know why it's only letting me okay so um let's go through here I don't really is pretty sets much easier just lightning presets as well sometimes there's its fun to use like the visco filters and stuff but that's not something I'm super keen on you know I kind of like the ability just to edit my myself and stuff so one thing that I start with is I usually will turn my screen when I'm editing at home I turned my screen down tohave a little over half power I do that because when you're looking at a file uh when you're looking at an image uh on a backlit illuminated screen you're you're not seeing it for really how it's gonna be printed so I'm printing something on a canvas or metallic or whatever paper it's not going to look the same as as bright or as vibrant as it was when I was looking at our editing my backlit illuminated screen a totally dark room right so I powered down halfway uh mainly so that I could get a realistic look how I want it to be it's the same with my phone too you know I'll do the same thing like if you're always anything your photos in the very brightest thing and then you go somewhere else they look really dark well it's probably because you know you had an unrealistic perception of how bright that file waas so let's go to this photo let's go here I'm in developing how'd I get this thing after I forget to do that I I noise again there we go I'm glad somebody knows they're doing here um cool so um these are right now these photos are d angie's ok dmg is a digital negative file it's a raw file that has all the information of the raw image when you shot it and it has a j peg overlay with all the settings in here of what you might have done okay so right now I'm gonna reset this image too it's very most raw format okay so right now it is in pure raw as shot off camera sadly it looks more vibrant there than it does on here by the way so if you want to flip that screen around you can uh but I just going to go through the basic settings of what I would do and what I would do that to edit this edit this image um now my my goal usually almost every time is to take it back to a place first before I really add any color before I do any that I want to take it back to a place where the exposure feels really even okay I liked working off a flat campus and a lot of people who shoot video or whatever that you know they they like they want all their settings and this as flat as they can write because then they have a realistic perception of what they can get out of that file so my camera settings internally on my cameras it's a neutral right I don't I mean sometimes people consent him too like saturated looks I just like such a neutral so it's flat as can be now the first thing I'm gonna do when I go in here is I'm just gonna kind of evaluate the image um look at it and think about okay well I want to brighten up this I want to bring some detail back into the sky um I want to get some color out of these mountains and the first place I usually go to is my tone curve now the place I really want to be a fearful of is this stone right here this is the this is the friend zone um this is basically where your highlights your shadows your whites a lot of these is our very degrading filters meaning that they're basically just the user friendly slighted over your blacks will just make everything black or open everything up right your whites will just make all your whites white or vice versa right doesn't go really into any individual aspects of the image right so I'm gonna go down here into tone curve where I can work on the individual shadows and darks okay so I'm gonna go through here I'm going teo um I'm writing this I've just because I want to make sure things for you guys right so I'm gonna go into here I'm gonna I'm gonna start toe individually work on the darks and the lights and see kind of what I can do what I can get away with now the highlights I move these over too much they start toe kind of blow out that volcano right I'm gonna do this I might even open up so my shadows as well I'm just kind of tweaking this to see what it looks like so now that I'm I'm here already and I might go back through here I'm going to kill so my highlights right open up the shadows shadows really one of those ones where you try to be super careful because you can do a lot of weird stuff to a file if you open up something a ton you're going to see a lot of noise you can start to see a lot of noise and there simply is not that noisy but um but I'm gonna open up the shadows a little bit like this and then I'm gonna kind of go through here so that the very last thing I want to do is work on my saturation just f y I that's the very last step because I want to see how much color I can pull out of this file before I touch my saturation vibrance of clarity um somebody go through here temperature I'm gonna start working on this I might cool this down a tiny bit and as I do this I'm making just micro adjustments there's really no rhyme or reason it's just all kind of micro adjustments here the ground a detail um I always use the same sharpening algorithm it's basically ninety eight percent um this is rock around twenty eight thirty and this is um here this is around sixty and this is I get twenty five and this is just for some reason I don't know why but this is the best sharpening algorithm I found to use um and I like the way that it it looks you know if I'm if I'm zooming way way way in obviously if I have to crop into a file ah ton then I'll back off a little bit you know but if this photo is just going to be used for a jpeg overlay this is kind of what I'll go with it so um so here I am I'm right here now I wantto I wantto check this out first um pressing af just look in my file okay so before we touch anything else let's just lookit let's reset this file and just see what we've done so far so this is how it wass and this is where it is now reset look how much color has been brought out of this image from just doing those adjustments know saturation nothing I find that our tendency is probably to go here first to the saturation bar first right and it's probably the worst thing we can do because we're kind of ruining the editing process for ourselves so now that I've done this I'm going to go up to here I'm gonna start to mess around with my thumb with some of my grady ints right so now I have a great aunt filter that I can pull down okay and this is basically like just adding a neutral density rights not as good as doing in camera um but I would never shoot this scene right here with the grady it because obviously I'm shooting action I want to be focusing really fast I'd never want another piece of glass in front of my lens but it definitely calls for a grady in right so I'm gonna take this grady it down is already familiar with this little tool right here kind of yeah so this is where this line right here is where the real change is happening and this is basically like where it's kind of bleeding out and feathering right so I'm gonna bring this down right here and I'm gonna bring this back a little bit boom highlights boom look how much more detail I'm pulling out of the this guy right here so now that I've brought that down a little bit I could even change the temperature if I wanted I could make the sky a bit more blue which is kind of nice right um now I realized ok my image is looking great but I could probably just bump my tyr images exposure up just a little little tiny bit right um so now that I'm here I'm still kind of messing with the shadows and there might come back through and it's every time you're making adjustments kind of reworking your image right I'm looking at how this is affecting the hills a little bit maybe maybe want these hills a little more contrast e there so I'll keep that kind of in this realm uh the one thing I really never touched I never really touched this um besides you know the detail effects never touched any of these so I tryto cut out all these tools and this bar that I'm not using so I'm really just limiting it to these three um I know that you know there are people out there who have a much better expertise and handle on this but the images that you're seeing for me are really just being processed with thes three basic areas okay so now that I'm here I'm gonna open this up a little bit right I'm gonna even brightened this just a tiny bit more to so now I'm gonna go in here in a mess of my saturation and this is kind of one of those things where I try to keep limitations on myself usually I like to keep it around twenty under twenty or so so saturation is a great tool right it's always nice to kind of go both ways like wow looks incredible there but pretty inaccurate it's like the hills look like they're in a sci fi film in the skies too bright so um you know probably keep it around around twenty ish right there um clarity this is a tool I really do not like I never really use it ever um it's just something that I feel like ads that kind of a funky hdr effect images and I'd rather not mess with it too much vibrance though who is in a lot of ways one of the better form of saturation you khun ad it's like smart saturation right because it's basically just taking the air taking the elements of your image that have color and making them brighter right so vibrant so I might go in here and I tried to eat the same thing I try to limit its like twenty so I might just keep it under here like eighteen or so and now that I've got management kind of check it out again look att what it looks like it's still um on my screen at least feels like it could be brightened up a tiny tiny bit right I might just want to like open up this little round little bit so what am I gonna do I love the exposure of the sky here um so I might come into here actually might start in here and I might just do one of these and just basically take this person right here and opened them up just the tiniest little bit right just to brighten up him a little bit so now the bottom my frame is brightened I kind of feel like this bottom section is a little too bright right so might go one more time just to a little tiny one because you see there's a big difference to in this this light right here let me just races for this larry here in this right yeah this whitewash which is reflecting a ton of light so I might go into here and just do the tiniest little bit of um like take it down twenty percent um and then crush the highlights in this little field right here right so um that that gives me a little smoother grady in into this wave right I'm thinking of it like you know you're you're burning and dodging your painting this base so you're kind of opening it up in this capacity so um so I've done that cool I uh I also want to add just a tiny bit of coolness to this wave right here and make a little more blue um I also might just come in here and just do one more little thing like this into the sky not the volcano but just see see if you adult about texture in the sky obviously makes it look a little more dramatic okay um you know way way dramatic but I just want to go in here and just add like the tiniest hold it right I find that good processing is really all about the subtleties right and working on the subtleties so this is a little bit too much to take it back to the eighteen percent here um and I'm gonna come into here and just crush my highlights a little more because the one thing I'm really not a fan of is just blown out spots on an image right hopefully this is showing more what this is showing that this is a bit inaccurate which is which is tough so so let's look at this here I've got here's my image um you know I have a nice grady in the sky the volcano feels sharp it's it's hitting against the background the color and the light feels realistic their colors that I've actually seen before which is a scary thing when you get online because things can just start to get super haywire and uh and let's go back through here and reset is that we started with and this is where we are now this year we started with misery are now do you have questions on that process of this image yes do you find yourself painting painting uh is in the paper uh sh um I will probably paint a few images on here for you guys and show you what what when I would use that but yeah there's times I for sure use that mainly just to like if I wanted to go in here the paintbrush by the way he's talking about this tool up here the paintbrushes basically this same grady it but it's in a circular thing so if I wanted to go into here and you guys just so you know I always have this turned up because I want to see exactly because I like to turn down um I have this always turned up the brightest mainly so that I can see what I'm doing if you have this like if you have this right like this you can actually see what you're touching right what this paintbrushes actually affecting but if you have this thing turned like you know to whatever like I don't know ten percent you're barely going to see it so like see this little whitewash maybe I want to get more detail out of there maybe I want to darken it up right and I found the paintbrush it's all about the subtleties so like maybe negative you know sixteen percent okay that's all I'm doing there um which that zeroed out uh that's all I'm doing there and all it's doing just adding the tiniest bit of detail in that little whitewash so that's usually when I might do that or a portrait you might open someone's you know open up parts of its face a waterfall I might work on that section I'll show you some other instances where I might use that other questions from yeah any reason yours in light room and not photoshopped uh because everything I want to do in light room is literally at this right in here and everything I want to do in a photo shop I'd be going up and down and up and down up and down all these presets and basically but here's the thing is that the images that I'm I'm editing and processing are ninety nine percent of time for clients so what I'm doing is I'm color correcting needs to give my suggestion of how I like the image they're taking them and they're doing whatever they want to them it's really not up to me when you're sending photos to client that's you know for a commercial project you don't you don't have like this creative control then they could turn it black and white they could do whatever you know they're not gonna like photoshopped you know some random dragon in the back but it's a matter of like I only have so much say so I'm editing this to give my interpretation now that well we get into the dmg thing you'll understand why and why it is important because when you're submitting raw files if you were just submitting a raw file with no edit all they would see is this but when I'm submitting a d e n g I'm submitting this raw file they could go back and do whatever they want they can click reset and I'm also submitting this on top of it so they're getting all of my settings plus this jpeg overlay just like a mask over the raw file they could go back they can edit every single thing from raw so the question is why would you not do it why would you not use the dmg and it gets better to as we go on but but yeah this is just this process is really just a matter of you know everybody has their own editing style there's no way I could be like this is is the way to do it you know maybe some people have that interpretation but for me it's just a matter of how I like to color quick my image is now the reason I don't use photo shop is because photocopies a time suck and I feel like it's every time I get into it I love the program I've used it a lot but I used to waste hours mean this program has basically taken every tool that you need in photo shop and putting it right there and I've literally done a lot of test because I I own a gallery printing is a huge apartment business I've done so many tests where I've tried to see okay I edit everything from light room and everything from photoshopped exact same I submit the files which one's better there's absolutely zero difference okay zero difference the on ly time that I use photo shop is if I have to do some actual intense post processing where a client's like hey can you remove this tag or this like can you make this logo nicer whatever that might be right which usually we're not doing or if I need to interpret an image to a larger scale now I feel super comfortable editing a light room file up to like a twenty by thirty no problem but if I'm gonna edit a photograph bigger than a twenty by thirty I'm gonna want to inter plate it and to interpret late you have to go into photoshopped you open image size and basically what you're gonna do is you're going you're going to make your image larger in small increments so um I don't even know if there's actually photo shop on this computer I can I can try and show you that guy's if we have time but I really want to get through this first but just so you guys know quick quick breakdown the interpolation process small increments going to go into image size you're going to change the parameters to percentage right and what you're gonna do is you're gonna up your percentage ten percent so or five percent what everyone teo so you do ten percent okay click ten percent okay and basically you're upsizing it percentage wise so you get up size it by pixels get up sides by inches you get upside is that any way you want but this is just doing ten percent so you and that ten per cent you click okay your image is getting larger and what it's doing is it's allowing your image kind of like in a lot of his time to grow right rather than just clicking eighteen hundred feet by five hundred feet just going boom it's going to go little increments and what I've found is that that is the most accurate way to do that you also when inter plating you want to sharpen last the very last thing you should do is sharpen your image because the amount of sharpening is really based on the size of your file question you can answer it I was gonna ask why you didn't why you went ten percent of the time you just want to give it room to grow you know pretending of this image is smaller and you want to blow it up too big do you change the post on it like opportunity of final image in and when you get bigger eso eso se I haven't saved in a file that's like it's optimized for eleven by fourteen so you're saying yeah I'd go back to the raw and I did it for twenty by thirty with with um because basically when I saved this file so so you guys what if I you know if I were to save this file right now I would have the option to save it in a lot of different ways so I could go teo export what can I do okay so all of these these images that we're working on they're just going back onto my download folder okay they're getting there getting saved in the exact same folder that they came from all of them and then I'm a racing the raw files because the dmg they're taking their place does that make sense so but if but if I was going to save it as a as a printable file right everything that gets printed eventually has to come back to a j peg okay that's that's just the only it's the only printable format right I mean you can't print raw files they have to be converted to j fakes to be printed right can't print tiff files that could be converted to j figured pretty that's what printer does that's what every everyone does so I would basically I would if I was going to save this as you know a twenty thirty I would go into here and I would go to okay so put into uh you know folder this would be like print or something like that I might go into uh um or I might make a specific folder for this volcano surf print and then I might go into here and go hundred percent j peg within height um let's let's change this teo yeah within height pixels inches so what's the size I want teo um twenty by thirty right so thirty on the with and twenty by the height right um or like eleven by fourteen or whatever that is right you can just you can adjust this thing and they're resized to fit right and then resolution obviously if you were saving as a print would be to forty two three hundred somewhere in there pixels per inch uh right and then sharpen for screen I don't really do that um no watermark and then I'd export but these are not being these air not being saved that way the way these are being saved is these air being saved in the exact same way that they are the exact same folder that they are I'm putting them into um is my dmg okay um medium sized jpeg on them um all of these things don't really matter because these air just according to like the little overlay on the image sizing there's no image sizing because it's a raw file you can't size a dmg files it's this to the size of your raw image you shot can't sharpen a dmg files um there's really nothing you can do to it at all all you khun dio is decide you know do you want to embed fast low data yeah probably I don't even know what these things mean I've never had issue with them because the j peg that's being over late you're not using that for anything it's just something to see on a raphael you can't print the dmg you have to take it back into photoshopped her light room sorry and converted as a j peg um so I would save this I would save this as volcano surfer I mean I would say this probably in a in a folder labeled dmg that's inside my original folder right so that that file's been saved um now I want to get through anything just a few more of these you guys and I want to do some different variations to show you like some night photos and some other ones their specific image in here that you really are aching for me to color correct this one just because it's the darkest that's out of this one this is a really good one this is a really good one because it was it's it's a print this is a photograph that I sell a ton of prince I've had this thing and it was shot very dark because I knew that I needed freeze the action uh but I was didn't want to like bump the ice because it was shot back in the day with like an icon and I'm shooting it like you know four hundredth of a second which is very very slow to shoot waves but um so this thing is basically this there's no color correction or edit on here um I'm gonna bring let's start to edit so first thing I'm gonna do is gonna bring it to an exposure that I feel like it's is acceptable right when I go through here I'm gonna crank up my highlights a bit because I know that this guy can handle it my lights just a tiny bit but I'm not going to give it much darkness that's already pretty dark I'm gonna open up actually we're going to hear message my shadows a bit trying to get um trying to looking in here making sure there's not too much noise being created in there do you use a tablet uh wake up sometimes yeah way comes or great I occasionally well uses in our office um so I've got it kind of to a place where I feel like it's a fairly even exposure and you guys can see on that screen but now I know that this thing needs it needs a bit of needs some color obviously the sky was amazing and you can tell there's a lot of car there so one of the first things I can do is I could bring this back this way and I can bump the exposure down and more importantly exposure is played the highlights because you're going to bring so much detail back bye crushing these highlights right it's a boom crushing those I just want to make sure not to add even yet ing unnecessary even getting into the corners here so I'm trying to be very cognizant of that um I'm going to come into here I'm going to do a little tiny cause I love the exposure in the middle of the frame but I think this body I'm component could have a little tiny bit of light so I'm just gonna open that up tiny bit maybe like a quarter stop um going to come through here see if my highlights can be crushed even a little more okay now I think it's in a good place let's reset look at where it came from wow it looks a lot better already I haven't even touched saturation at all and there's already so much color in this image and I'm gonna come through here going to start to add some saturation maybe maybe thirteen fourteen seventy percent uh little bit of vibrance twelve percent right I really like where this this file is going I'm gonna make my brush a bit smaller what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna add the slightest bit of light like a little line of light kind of on this wave surface right here groups um and obviously I made it bright like this so that I could see what I touched on what I did now I'm just gonna go very subtle um thirty percent maybe um doesn't feel doesn't feel like you can barely tell right um and it's the subtleties you know it's like you're trying to just kind of you know get some of these little details in here to pop up so I'm going to go through here messed with this a little bit let's see how this looks sometimes I mean I'm obviously I'd be taking a lot more time to do it but I only wanted up this like eight percent so it really doesn't matter right if you're doing something very you're going to do something really bright you really want to be detailed in there um now I'm going to zoom in a bit and I'm going tio I'm gonna just lighten up the face of this wave and all I'm doing is pressing uh this little I forget what bar this is right above the return bart's make is the one that makes us in larger or smaller okay and you could just go over here to just size and that will do it to auto mask is nice because it basically helps get no it'll it'll be it'll be intelligent well basically no like if I'm just trying to brighten up this on the automatic sometimes will help to know like seo it's stopping at the wave line I'm going above it groups usually it works it works along the line right so it's kind of helping me to like you know what I'm what I'm tapping into right so um I'm just gonna very carefully kind of kind of working to here right that's my little slug I made okay and I'm just gonna add the slightest tiniest little bit of like of light here I'm talking like you know eighteen percent or so I mean you can't even you can't you can barely tell right um now let's see this file I really like where this is where this has come too I mean I feel like it's in a really good place where's there's vibrant white sir's highlights the orange rocks below I might even just accentuate the warmth on these rocks a tiny bit by just turning the temperature up a little bit I always feel like if you have the ability to color correct I would rather see it done with temperature rather than um other than saturation you know selecting something because any of these things that I select I can always change the temperature on it's so much more natural okay so this would be that I'd be done um this file looks great let's just really quick reset where we at where do we get to yes you went straight in the horizon was that a little what if I noticed it but I didn't so thank you for that calling me out of my own game no no no it's great really important that's really important I definitely would um yes actually going along with their prize anything as far as that cropping do you do a lot of cropping and if I really don't do a lot of cropping I'm ally would only crop this obviously because of the horizon but at the same time I would want I usually don't crop these things mainly because I would want the magazine whoever to see what they have to work with if they're like this could be a great spread but it's too tight on the left side we'll there's it's uncross let me show you the un crop version you like you're just shooting yourself in the foot I mean a lot of times if I'm publishing this myself I would obviously crop this but usually this is the thing is like most people I'm working with whether it's a magazine whether it's a company or editor there going to be having an art director take this image and process themselves they're going to be the ones laying out they're going to doing all this stuff I'm just doing this so that I can as a creative and as a you know as a photographer I want to give them my look to it I want to show them what I saw and the only reason you guys that I feel in any way validated to even speak on the subject is that ninety nine percent of the time the color corrections that I make are the ones that they use okay so let's let's pick one more image I'd like to edit a night photo I'm to show you guys this so let's reset this boom like that just so you guys coming look out little and this was on there by the way so let's go to develop I want to show you guys this is the file you can see the screen is like weird that there's not like a weird shadow blood house tough on that normally um so I come into here once again I bought my exposure up a little bit right I'm going to go through here I'm gonna mess with my highlights one more time I don't want to blow out the trees or the light right there's a really big hot spot where he is I also to it I don't want to you know blow up this sky behind him but I want to get some light coming out of there the uh the shadows I don't really need shadows in here I'd rather just open them up a little bit um cool now that I've kind of got a good baseline going I'm gonna go through here at a little bit of opening my shot was a little bit but I want to be careful of the noise down in this section right make sure it's not too noisy um oh you know I forgot to dot last photo after out to sharpen it and by the way sharpening adds a lot of saturation usually I find that when I sharpen an image makes everything really kind of pop a bit more that's why it's one ofthe everything's to do quite a quite close to the end so now that I've got kind of this exposure in this file opened up a little bit I can come I can open up my exposure and then I can come back act through and crush my highlights right because if I was to leave the exposure like it wasn't look bad but if I crush my highlights now that exposure works right now it's working for this file so I'm coming through crushing my highlights I've been able to open up this file a little bit um now I'm gonna go through here when I open up my sky just just the slightest right just like you know maybe maybe thirty percent or something I'm also going to go back through and just add some coolness into this entire frame and then I'm gonna add a little more coolness into the sky specifically because I like the blue tint to that okay um I'm gonna do one more down here another little grady it filtered down here right now you can see how much detail there is there but that's no way what I want to show I want to just show about you know nine percent maybe fifteen percent there we go um just something to give you a little more reflection there um I also noticed this photo because it was shot at night it's a longer exposure I've got a little bit of him getting and what I do what I might do here the only time really touch onto this is I might just try and open up if see if I could just add like a percentage one percent to that uh kind of make things makes things a little weird eh so I'm not gonna I was gonna try and take the vignette off of that but I don't I can't really do it because it's just making things look weird so um we'll leave it as it's got what about in len's corrections could do that it's just not really something I'm usually spend that much time doing but I do agree it's something that would be an awesome is another great thing to dive into I just don't think we have time to sadly so just keep in mind here's our file right now as it is ok let's go to reset this is what it came from this is where it is right now okay so now I'm gonna go through adolescence saturation maybe like ten twelve percent add some vibrance maybe here I'm noticing a little bit of a line here so I want to make this a little more grating down this um now that I've got that I'm going to go down here into sharpening when I sharpen images that are longer exposure and have a bit of noise I like to dole back on the sharpening just a tiny bit more than normal okay so here will be my final image um I've got you know and nice amount of rich blacks I don't have a lot of noise in here um there's there's the stars seemed good this seems really sharp and I know that I could print this in a pretty large scale any what we're zooming into right here would be basically almost a billboard size you know on this screen especially now the only thing I might do um here tio is if I wanted to the very first step would be if I wanted to add some noise reduction I might add some noise reduction in this you know there's there's no riel rhyme or reason this I usually start like this I bring the detail back all of these back and I just start really simply because the noise reduction is a is a really interesting tool it can make your images great or it can make them feel kind of soft and junkie right so in a way I don't like how this looks looks painted like like it's brushed on these little corners right here right as opposed to when I have you know those stars look physically brighter when I have less noise reduction on so you got a final balance in here if you have a lot of issues if you have if you have a very grainy image ah which you do need a lot of noise reduction done um here um then you can we find one more photo there was one in this batch then you can use of software program called um topaz labs de noise it's a program that actually have uploaded on this computer but it can be worked through photoshopped or it can you worked through light room and basically all you do is you go to your file right and then when you're in here I think you go to edit uh library it's basically just a plug in um so you go to you just add a plug into it you go down you add your plug in I don't even know where it would be here I'll get plug in extras plugging managers um you know you basically just add that plug in and what it would do is like I said you could papa been photoshopped so if you want to use it there compartment light room and what I recommend doing is basically any time you're gonna adami plugin sharpened after you finish the plug in right so you do all your processing you go to the plug in it would take you to topaz labs dino is great it's awesome it's an awesome little filter and that is just a much much more it's a program that's purely built around removing noise from long exposures or high eyes so images and I found a lot of good results with especially when printing things big so that's kind of that's kind of my go to for that

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Ratings and Reviews

Sjeupie
 

I've been staying up all night to watch the live broadcast. As somebody else here mentioned (latsok), it's emphasizes on the non-technical aspects (emotion, engagement, colour and composition) rather than the technical stuff like shutter speeds, iso and f-stop. Although I can use some help in both, the technical aspects are not only camera specific but fairly objective as well. The non-technical aspects however are something much harder to grasp. Getting help in this by no-one less than Chris Burkard is just amazing. I bought this class so I can re-watch certain parts of the broadcast again whenever I need it. But also to show my appreciation for Chris Burkard and Creative Live for providing this great online course!

Matt Redfern
 

This class was packed full of amazing knowledge. I really enjoyed the topics covered and have found it super helpful for my work. I have had so many takeaways ranging anywhere from how to put myself out there, finding my style that stands out, practical applications, etc. I would highly recommend this class to everyone interested in photography! Big thanks to Chris and CreativeLive for putting this together.

user-082aad
 

This was a phenomenal class. I highly recommend it to anyone. Chris is not only a sensational photographer, he is a wonderful teacher. He provides such detailed information and freely gives same to his students. He is really really available and eager to answer questions and so easy to understand. I learned so much and I was thrilled. I am very very grateful I found this particular class.

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