Lessons

Lesson Info

Digital Dark Room: Camera RAW

we have now a filmstrip on the left. If you are a light room user, you know that film strip is down at the bottom. If you're a light room user, you know that this little tool palette over here is over here in light room. If you know, in a CR where we have these little teeny I'm tabs that are left to right to showcase the different capabilities within adobe camera raw within light room, their top to bottom little tabs that you expand. Aside from that, the engine here that we're looking at is exactly the same engine as in light room. The files are compatible. If you have a file here, you can open it up in light room and you'll have the exact same snapshots and settings and everything else. I will mention one thing related to that because both a CR and light room are metadata Editors, Raw editors, Not pixel pushers. They're saving this metadata along with your original file, all the instructions that we're going to do, or simply little mathematical instructions, including when we paint an...

d dodge and burn. Those are still just instructions, not changing the actual pixels. If you're shooting in raw, um, your proprietary world FAM format like cannon CR twos or the Nikon F files are prepared proprietary. Adobe does not have access to those file formats in the sense of saving back to them. So it has to write. When you do some jiggery pokery over here to that raw file, it will write a sidecar file that rides along with it. Okay, In light room, it stays in the catalog is a default in adobe camera raw stays inside your system as a default, you can tell adobe camera raw. Would you please put that sidecar file in with the folders and it will do that, which is nice, but they are distinct. That is why a lot of people will take their raw files. And if they're not using the raw converters that came with their camera, they will convert those raw files into adobes own proprietary raw format known as DMG or digital negative. Because Adobe does own that, it can store all the raw data and the metadata. Inside that one file, it becomes one self contained file, which is awfully nice for archiving purposes, especially if you are a light room user. And you know, the little trick of command s when you're done editing a session because as a deep all, even if you convert your images to DMG, that metadata does not go into that file for speed purposes. It's written to your catalog. The database that holds everything about that file that's the one challenges you probably know about light room is that if you're catalogue and your images get separated, they get divorced. They're pissed at each other. That ain't pretty. If you talk about a pretty not nice scenario, it ain't good. So, um, even though there's back up in the catalogues and everything's fine and it rarely happens those air in the olden days, a little tip. If you're light room user, when you're done with a session to a select all for everything you just worked on into a command S or control s on the PC, that will force that metadata inside of the files difficult. Hold it as well as having in the catalogue. That way, that file actually becomes a self independent one. You can drag it out and it has everything associated with it. The labels star rating the keywords the metadata and all your adjustments. So that's a really nice little feature that command s It's not turned on as a default because it slows down the process. If it constantly rights to it, the other get to that in one second. The other thing that if you're shooting J Peg J Peg or tiff or both open file formats, those also can have the metadata tucked inside cause Adobe can write to it. Same thing that an a C. R. Because it doesn't have a primary catalogue, it will write to those formats. It will put it inside, and it's automatically self contained. Light room is the one because of speed. It's the state of based manager. It will only right inside that file. If you do that, command s. And if you do a select all command s and everything you just worked on, it will write it to that file. Whether it's a DMG jpg or tiff. Yes, question. So I question just so I have no command us anywhere. Can you go back and do that in your light room? You have never done that. No, no. You can go back at any time. You can. Actually. Before you go to beds, you can do your entire library. If you want. It will add to your hard drive space whatever you're doing. But metadata doesn't take it nearly as much as a real file. Does the wind year old done? Just do a select all command s and go to sleep. I believe it. And it will do all that for you. Thank you. Yes, it's a nice little safety net. Just because of the catalogue gets corrupted, the images actually are still self contained for teaching purposes. You'll notice when I have my final images, especially my light room in a CR classes. All my files are DMG because I can make sure that the students they don't have there's no catalogue involved. You just literally import my images into your own catalogue or whatever everything's there. There's no catalog. You don't combine my catalogue with yours and do anything else. So it's a really nice feature. The other thing that is nice about, um, DMG and Raw And this concept are smart previews which we won't get into now. But smart previews are allowing light room to work with mobile like room, so you can work on raw files on your IPad. The technical term is bitchin. Lo rez, riel raw files downloaded and manipulated in real time on your mobile device that you can even work offline on your mobile devices like mobile is awesome. I want to do a whole class on it here at creative life. We don't have that set up yet anyway. OK, so we've got our film strip down. Here are tools at the top and are different palates. Down here we have what are known or the workflow options at the bottom. Here we have our new preview options here. If you didn't know, preview now has finally been added to adobe came A Rod's been like room for a while. Tapping the peaky will give you before and after previews for everything you've done to the file, including side by side comparisons. Very nice up brand new feature snapshots that I mentioned before. Here is an example of the snapshot of that final image. And before I always take snapshots of my image. If I come up here and tap the peaky, there's my preview before and after, so snapshots will get into that later especially. We're here for the every single one of these 10 classes is broken up into shooting techniques as well as tweaking techniques especially geared toward that technique, but also that our general one. So we cover a ton of stuff in the in this area in this area of tweaking images. Okay, um, and down here at the lower left hand kind, lower left hand corner he save now has been extended to change size, color, space output sharpening tiff, different file formats Naming, renaming. It's awesome. So where a CR has been the second class citizen, too big boys use like room. You can do a huge amount of work. Adobe didn't need to extend adobe camera raw to be as powerful as it is. It could have been where real photographers use light room. They haven't. It's awesome. It's great. They continue to extend it. And so Okay, so, uh, portrait, let's go ahead, and we'll just do this one right here. We won't use this snapshot, so I'm gonna start off with what I call my five step tango for instantly optimizing images and five steps or less. First step, white balance or crop. If that's an issue. Um, I don't see white balance being an issue. I've got natural light. Usually it's only under artificial light, and I don't need to crop it Have already cropped in Kim Run. Let's go here. And crop. There's my crop. Already did a slight little crop to bring it in to it. I'm looking at in terms of crop. I'm looking at this shape around my subject. If I clear this crop just to touch a little bit, we'll talk more about crop. Um, I'm looking around the shape around my subject. I want some sort of symmetry between him. I don't usually you don't want too much space above the head. I don't want to cut off the top of the head in this one. I'm seeing this much space on my left. I like having a cemetery around my subject matter in terms of crop, if possible, around say top and bottom from getting close to a side. I like that. That consistency, that unity, that gestalt actually helps unify your image. So if I'm looking at something like this as an example, I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to. By the way, if you're in the middle of a crop. This is another new feature in a CR. I'm in the middle of the crop. I haven't let go yet. I'm holding down the space bar. This is how it works in photo shop, space bar, lads, you move the crop around while you're in the midst of it. I let go of the crop and now I'm back to pulling out the crop. So in other words, I could get it right where I want it, cause when I first clicked, I wasn't quite sure till I dragged over. So by holding down the space bar, you can move the crop while you're in the midst of doing it again. It's the same as in photo shop. The other area where this is really nice is let's say that you're trying to crop a circle, so you crop in, you start that crop and you never quite got it dead center because it was off a little bit. So you can hold down the space bar, re center it, let go the space bar and then continue to drag it out in any way that you want. You have no idea what I'm talking about. Try it and you're gonna go. Oh, I see what he's talking about. But Space bar lets you re move the crop. I'm still in the midst of doing it. I still have the ability to once I let go with the parallel top and bottom. Now I can come over here looking at this right hand side. I don't like that kissing. That's an awkward thing where something isn't being cropped off and isn't having air being able to go around it. It's trapped space, and it's giving me a sharp point that I is going to go to that sharp point so I don't like sharp points. Anything we're a subject or a portion of the subject hits just to it. It kisses it. It's uncomfortable. It's attention that doesn't have a benefit to it. So I'm going to come up here and I'm gonna crop into it. So there's a definite stop. A person the eye does not go to the edge of the elbow and then off the frame, so I'm also going to be using that for a crop coming up here. I don't need that much knee. I like the need cause that shows where he's resting it. Um, but I don't need that much knee. If I was going out to print, obviously I'd be going up to my aspect ratio to make sure I had a four by five rate by 10. But in this case, I'm not worried about that. I actually, like the little bit of out of focus green in the foreground there, So I'm gonna go back over to the left. I still haven't let go of my my finger there. And so now I'm going to give myself a little bit more space above the head because I've moved the the crop over to the left, have a little bit more negative space on the side of his head. And therefore, I want a little bit more space above. Okay? And I'm gonna come down here that same thing looking in the lower left hand corner, that little leaf if I were to go right there, that again. Is that awkward kissing? So I'm either gonna come up here and crop a portion of it. So it definitely is is solid at that bottom, or I'll give it some black. The black little There's no reason for that. I'm gonna want to come up here and crop a portion of it so that it stops there in that corner. Okay, I could see that because of that, it's a bright green that it may be a little bit. I make it rid of that corner. It's a matter of fact, I probably will, but I'm gonna leave that little element there. OK, so we'll say that that is my crop. There. There, you're seeing your rule of thirds come up in my crop. So it's not going exactly right to the I. If I was really concerned with that, I could come down here and have my rule of thirds where I'm looking for an intersecting of those lines right there. This line right here being intersected, and I could do that. It's close enough again. It's just a general rule. It's not a law. Um, we didn't bring up the idea of the golden mean, uh, the fib. Jaci. Um, sequence guys all know about. It's a movie with Tom Hanks about the Vatican. No, it's a, um, way of, of looking at the division of space and we'll talk about it. Another time in one of my classes, but it's known as generally the golden mean, and it's this idea of intersecting area with squares and intersecting those squares and it becomes a spiral. And it gives you another variation on this rule of thirds where the eyes that basically how nature creates patterns the fractal design of a the spiral of a nautilus shell or fern. Those are following this. This form that's found in nature that is known as the baby ACI sequence have to make sure I'm pronouncing that correctly. Okay, so there. I've got my crop attempt. Seiki, get that out of there. First step crop and White Balance. I think the white balance isn't an issue here. Next step Auto Auto is going to try and do all six of these different elements over here. I mean, the basic what's known as the basic panel over here, the very first panel in both light room in a CR. It's using the ashot temperature so you can see that this is a real raw file. By the way, if you ever open up a file and this starts off as zero or these numbers aren't in thousands, then it's a J pay because you really can't change white balance on a J pig. These are in degrees Kelvin, so since you can save a J peg out is a DMG. You can actually have a file that's completely cooked and has never been a raw file. But since you can save it in a DMG, some people are nefarious and say There is my raw file. It's been retouched, tweaked, cooked. It ate raw in any way, shape or form, and they'll anyway, we will go to them. So these are the six things that it took. A stab at exposure. Contrast. Highlight shadow, whites and blacks. Exposure is your middle tone value. It used to be a two versions back. It used to be your highlights, but now it's the middle tone value. So it's accurate. You'll notice that it took that up. Contrast. It took down one of the more elaborate settings we like contrast, but this actually took the contrast down and again, I'll take it for granted that it did a good job here. Highlights even on a file that's under exposed. It wanted to maintain the highlights. Remember, I've got the rim lighting on the hair. So it took those down. Okay, Like that. Shadows it took it up, knows that it's dark. It took the exposure and shadows up whites it fine tune. It took those up. Even though I've got spectral highlights in the hair. It went ahead and took those up and it took the blacks down even on a file that is actually under exposed. It wanted toe nail those down and, um, took those down. So it's a very elaborate algorithm. Sometimes it does a good job. Sometimes it doesn't do a good job. All I use it as a starting point. If it works. Great. If not undo as is, the next step is part of to auto undo. It doesn't float your boat, but it's a great stab is a starting place. Um three. Um uh, exposure. Trying to remember my own thing? Um, exposure, clarity, shadow Highlight. We're going to do exposure is your middle tone value. And in this case, when you're dealing with the portrait, your middle tone is your skin tone. So looking at an image overall, it's still looking dark. I'm looking at the skin tone specifically, and that's still looking dark. So I'm gonna take my exposure up and find Tune that that may be having my highlights be a little bit hot. So exposure, highlight and shadow we're gonna We're gonna mix up this thing for this image a little bit. Terms of my way. I'm going to do this. The order in which I'm going to do this because it's a portrait. Oftentimes I'll bring clarity in pretty quick into the equation. But in the portrait, I'm not too worried about it. So explosions in my mid tone values. I'm gonna take that highlight down because I'm already either losing some detail in the arm or it's just drawing too much attention to the arm. The eye is going to go to hot spots in the file, so there's no reason for that arm to have as much weight as it does by being so hot. So I'm taking my highlights down the shadows now look pretty good. So the highlights are my quarter tones. My shadows are my 3/4 tones. Looking up here, you'll notice that the shadows, for the most part, are my background. They're not really affecting the face, so I'm not gonna get too carried away with it because there's no reason for me to light in the background. It's what I'm trying to hide to begin with. So that's something to keep in mind with the Shadow slider. Often times we're going to go back in and do a targeted lightning of the shadows in the file. So they're just the shadows of my subject matter, not the shadows of my background. No reason to pull out detail and something you're tryingto through in the background to begin with. So exposure is my middle tone values. My highlights and shadows are my highlights and shadows quarter tones. And here is our before after Okay, so you can see how dramatically I'm able to reshape that image. Uh, I'm gonna keep going for all those two questions. In a second clarity, I bring clarity in pretty quick into the equation, very quick in a landscape because clear it is edge contrast. It is the popping that's gonna separate out the edges of subject from background, foreground and background. Adding it in something like a landscape is great because it's going to separate out texture and tone and atmospheric perspective and things like hills and a landscape, Um, and you'll notice. As with all of these sliders now, which has changed in the last two versions of a CR light room, they all start in the center. Some used to start over on the left hand side, so I'm starting in the centre of some would start in 10 clicks. Now they strolled Start dead center, which means you can add or subtract all of them, which is awesome, also technically known as bitchin because that means not on Lee. Can I add clarity as we come up here to exaggerate the the distinction of elements in the file, and you can see that I can add a lot to the image, but I can also take it out, and I can soften up the image, which is gonna be removing Edge contrast and edges is where the things called wrinkles live. So for Portrait's, oftentimes, especially for the glamour kind of work, a little anti clarity is going to be very, very useful. Ah, little plus clarity for landscapes or high school football teams or down for traditional portrait's. Okay, I can add a little bit here, but what I'm probably going to do is I'm probably going to do a targeted adjustment here where I will add some clarity to some places, but not in others. Or maybe because this is a portrait and we have some freckles and things here. If I want to take down a little bit, I will. So I'm taking down clarity just a little bit, and I'll add another, probably one of the neediest tips I can give you. And this relates to this idea that this is a procedural processor because all that adobe camera on light room remembers about your adjustments. Are these little mathematical slider settings. Even when you come in there and dodge and burn or do some retouching, which you can do, it's on Lee. Remember the numeric values. Even if you click a brush from here to here, it says, Okay, the brush was this big. It started here, did followed this past in its path, and it did. Here really isn't remembering about pixels, which is great. That's actually why it can take this low rez version on your IPhone, let you tweak it and automatically send it and reapply it and sink it toe a high res version on your desktop because it says Okay, it was this size before this size. Now I just change the America the parameters and we're good to go. Awesome, Cool For a lot of reasons, it's cool. But one of the really cool things about it is let's say that I'm doing 50 portrait's and I want to take a little anti clarity out for everything. The problem is, it's also taking out clarity on things like the eyes in the hair where I want ADM or Pop. I don't want to take out poppin soften eyes. One ad pop wolf I take out 13 clicks will call it of clarity globally. What do you think would happen if I took a brush here and added 13 clicks of clarity in this brush and painted into the file? What do you think the resulting effect would be bitchin? Well, yes, but fortunately, you guys I know it can do enough math. If I Suprapto 13 here and I add 13 here, What will be the effect? My, It will go back to normal. It has no effect whatsoever, which is completely different than how Photoshopped works, right? You had never subtract contrast here in another level, add contrast again and think they would cancel each other out. You would have degraded the image with the first adjustment. You would have degraded it further with next. You have to knock out and mask things like that because this is pure math. You can actually do this. Add subtract thing. And what that means is Aiken do skin softening on 1000 images globally. And then I come back in because the eyes move on each shot with a little brush, which is what I'm gonna do now. And I can come in here and not on Lee, can I add, say, the same 13 clicks plus, which brings the is back to normal. But I can come up here and I can do it. Edge enhancement on the eyes and Aiken eight. Say add 30 clicks, which not only am I neutralizing the anti 13 clarity, I'm adding another 13 to 20 clicks. On top of that, I'm now adding clarity to the eyes, which is cool. Also, cool chicken skin time. It's also that if you're from Hawaii, it's called goose ponds. If you're here in the States in Hawaii, is called the chi chicken scam brought whore only stays nice, so that can Okay, get that, um but by adding that because we have, we're now in adjustment brush, which is basically that basic panel in a targeted adjustment Bitchin, soft edged, airbrush, bitchin density to it. We'll talk about why that's different from a pastie later on. But the nice thing is is that I have everything here at my disposal. So I don't do one adjustment at the time, which I do in photo shop. I do hue saturation. I do levels. I do curves. I do. Sharpening each one is a bloody layer with its own mask. And whatever I'm doing here, if I want that I hear do not only have some pop to it, but I want the highlights to be brighter in the eye. I may even want to neutralize some ambient light. If it's got a little bit of blue or something like that, I can even change. Ah, little bit of color casts if I'm getting in that of getting a little there a little bit blue there. Um well, just say those things. Aiken do 100 different things. I could even had a little sharpness, which I tend not to do what it picks, the level I could do. Noise reduction, more rate reduction, clarity, sharpening saturation, all in one adjustment. So now when I come up here and come into his eyes when I come up here on this nice off brush and I want Oh, I'm gonna create a mask here because I'm doing a targeted adjustment, I always want to see that mask. So coming over here, I want to show that mask down here in the bottom of the palate. Tapping the y key also automatically turns that on. That's a shortcut. That's useful. So now I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to do the ice here. I may even add the eyelashes in there because now that clarity is gonna do instant mascara. Some do instant eye popping here. And if I'm getting a little carried away, holding down the option key on the Mac are all key on. The PC automatically gives me my eraser. So I confined to knit. That is also good to know, because if you're doing rather than working with a little teeny brush going into the corners, big, sloppy race. Small allows you to work much faster. I can come over here. We'll do this big. Sloppy. Okay, hold down my option key. Come in. Fine. Tune it. Get the corners. Okay. It also shows you why walking tablet is kind of essential even for this kind of retouching. Get it? They're awesome. Okay, when I tap the white key to get rid of it, and here is my before and after, and it's a little hard to see what's going on here. I'm gonna kind of exaggerate. What's going on here is the pin that was dropped. That showing you that particular area. So let's go ahead. And I'm gonna actually take up shadows as well. Gonna be able to look into the eye a little bit. So I'm adding to that. I I've already brightened up the highlights. I've added the clarity. Let's exaggerate it. You can see what it's doing in turn of that edge contrast to the file and, um, zooming out. I now have a brush that is doing a significant I pop, and it's a similar brush that you could use on teeth as well. You didn't want to soften up the teeth or the things in the file. Thank I could also come up here in here because I am getting the ambient light of the green of the trees and everything else I could add. Another brush will just come up here and do say, you know, a little bit of exposure and a little bit of anti saturation and do the whites of the eyes Okay, Just a little tap to add same thing that you would do with the teeth. Get rid of stains by de saturating and adding a little bit of pop by adding some brightness to it. Okay, that is a little bit more than needed. Probably didn't even really need the whites of the eyes. But, um, there is our file. So far, all we've done is set our skin tone, which is our exposure. We added a little bit mawr going back here to our basic. We took our highlights down so as to minimize the contrast between our highlights and our mid tones. And we let by hitting auto, we let it automatically choose the contrast for us and things like our white and black point. The last thing that I'll do here is of the step of my tango is going to be vibrance and been Yet Vibrance is intelligent saturation. It's where you can come up here and it's going to saturate what is de saturated and bounce it out with what was already saturated. Being very cautious about skin tone, meaning as opposed to saturation. Where I take that up and the skin is gonna go radioactive and the greens are gonna go radioactive and it won't be pretty. It'll they will. Those colors will go screaming to their death, and saturation will sleep well at night after it's done. So vibrant scares by vibrance is going to try and balance it out. Add as much pop is you can stand without going radioactive. Okay, the last thing is been yet, and vignette is kind of an odd for an optimizing step because it's usually a special effect. But because you have so much power with that ability to bring in shadow detail again, here's our before. After before, after you can see how it bounced that out, how the highlights aren't getting blown out by going in here to the effects panel and going down to post crop and yet, and go to color priority, which is the most subtle out of all these zoom up here. So we're in the effects panel. We're in the, um that's panel down here under post crop vignette color. Priority is the more subtle out of these three options is my favorite and doing a little minus off on the amount. You'll notice that I can throw that background back where it belongs in the background. If I come up here and I start darkening up my highlights too much like you notice his arm if it starts to actually look like a vignette, which I don't like, let's say you've got nice white, puffy clouds and they're starting to get a little muddy. Remember, you've got highlight sliders. You can say, Don't put a vignette on the highlights. Okay, so it is nice. So you don't get that thing that people that why they don't like vignettes, I can also increase the feather on it. I can also change that midpoint, so it's just in the corners. I can bring it more into the center of the image. Often times I'll take that midtown that midpoint up, so it's really in the corners and increased the feather. So I'm just getting wanting to dark in those corners of the eye is not wanting to go off the frame. Everything I'm doing is to keep the eye inside the story that I'm trying to tell. And here is my before after before after Okay, Yes. Look at your, um hissed a gram as you do that before and after it's showing how your Yes. Yes, it is. It is showing exactly what I'm doing in terms of where everything was heavy down on the last quarter tones. And now it's evenly distributed around the image. You're not clipping on the outside. Where you going? Click up here in the upper left and upper, right. And it would show you if there was any clipping taking place. But because I hit auto, it set that black and white point. It could do that very well because it knows where the extremes of the history mark Okay. Yes. What sort of ah monitor do you use to edit on home? Definitely not a laptop if you can get away with it. Because obviously it's variable based upon this angle, I the apple cinnamon displays are excellent. The ones that are built into the I Max or Big, Beautiful and gorgeous those air wonderful ones I just picked up. But I can't tell you about it yet, because I haven't calibrated it. But there are new four K 4000 k resolution basically monitor slash TV sets, and there are some actually nice, affordable ones. Be going Amazon and put in four K monitors. So I just picked up a 36 inch, four K monitor, which is, you know, very nice. High resolution for 400 something ridiculous price for what's a dramatically high res monitor. So four K and Apple is adding four K support for their new operating system. That's about ready to be updated, So I think you're gonna see a lot more of those four K being standard for monitors, both for TV sets as well as for computer monitors. But because I haven't calibrated it yet, I'm not giving you specifics on it. That's the issue, and it may not be able to be really calibrated until Apple updates their operating system. But you do want a good one. You do want to calibrate it. You do want to use something like color monkey or I one or something. You need hardware calibration in order to do that.