(upbeat music plays)
- Bonjour madam.
What's going on?
Oh, you have no clouds.
You're not happy with the photo?
Madam, may I help you?
Okay, I'm going to show you something really cool.
First of all, what you have in front of you is not good.
You have sand with footsteps.
It's not good.
What you put in front of the camera is
the most important aspect.
So come with me.
I'm gonna take your camera
and I'm gonna move it closer to the water.
Is that okay?
(upbeat music plays)
Right now the sky is too bright.
You need to wait for the sun to hit the horizon
because then the sky is gonna be more pastel,
and it's gonna be nice.
And you need to expose for the sky,
meaning you want to get a dark photo.
So let me show you.
(upbeat music plays)
So you see I go very low
because I like to have this very clean sand as a foreground.
You see the problem you have now
is that there's too much light.
And so we have a very fast exposure
and it doesn't really look nice.
The water looks very sharp.
It's nicer when the sun is gonna go down.
I'm gonna try to make like a bit of a long exposure.
So I'm gonna go to like 50 ISO
to make the sensor not sensitive.
And then like F/20 or F/22 to prevent the light from coming.
So it's gonna force me to be like a,
right now I'm like at one fifth of a second.
One fifth of a second is gonna gimme a little bit
of long exposure.
But we need to wait more because the sun needs
to touch the horizon.
A few moments later.
Madam, you have a lot of sensor dust in your camera,
a lot of sensor dust.
And sometime you know, you can get like a nice leading line
with the water if you have a fast exposure.
Right now, I'm at one eighth of a second,
which is pretty fast.
(camera clicks)
You see what I do is now that the sun is coming down,
I can really underexpose the photo.
I have a speed which is one fifth of a second at 50 ISO
and I'm positioning one third of sky
and two thirds of water
because I found the water really nice.
(camera clicks)
What we're gonna do is we're gonna wait for the blue hour.
You'll see the color will be even more crazy.
It's gonna get very saturated.
It's going to be amazing.
You're gonna love it.
So you see the sun is behind the horizon now,
but the colors is not nice yet.
But be patient because when the sun goes below the horizon,
everything becomes blue
and you have a few minutes.
Mwah. You will see.
We'll get long exposure and a beautiful gradient in the sky.
Be patient.
Okay, so here is my advice.
I put it at F/22 to stop the light to come
at 50 ISO so that we have a 1.3 second exposure.
Now it's your turn.
Try to take some photo.
The light is becoming beautiful because it's the blue hour.
And try different framing.
I'm sure you're gonna love it.
(camera clicks)
(upbeat music plays)
(camera clicks)
- [Instructor] Do you like this photo?
- Yeah.
- [Instructor] Okay, let's go to lightroom and retouch it.
- Yes!
- Bonjour, so I am back in my office.
Okay, I gonna stop with the French accent
and go back to good old American accent.
All right guys, welcome to the show.
So here we go.
I have this photo here of,
so my wife took this photo.
If you look at the settings here.
I wanna show you a few things.
It's one eighth of a second F/22, 50 ISOs.
She didn't have a filter on.
So that was the only way to get a long exposure
was to be at F/22.
The problem with that is that if you sensor is dirty
and her sensor was very dirty,
it goes really fast at the beach,
you can see there's a lot of mess here.
So one thing that I do
when I come back from the beach
and I have all these dirts
I'm gonna show you a little hack here.
And by the way,
all I'm explaining, this whole workflow is gonna be covered
in this book.
You can get a printed version of this book for free
if you pay shipping and handling.
All the information is under this video.
Anyway, so what I'm gonna do is,
I'm going to use this little tool here,
and it's the new tool, the content-aware fill tool.
And I'm gonna erase as much as I can all the dust.
And what you do is you with the middle mouse,
you can make that tool bigger or smaller.
You just make it a little bit bigger than the spot.
And you go everywhere where there is a spot.
And because F/22 unfortunately makes
really every spot stand out,
we have a lot of spots, but not a big deal.
This tool should get rid of it.
This one is a bit of a big spot here.
I'm gonna go like that
and of course I would put in more work,
but I give you a little trick.
So now if you erase all the spots,
I'm just gonna open a shadow,
bring down the highlights, lower the blacks and whites,
just to get a bit of contrast or add a bit of contrast.
And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take all
the photos that I've selected to show you today,
and I'm gonna synchronize basically,
well, I can do either check none,
I can just synchronize the basic exposure
and the healing brush tool.
And that way it's gonna correct this.
Now it's gonna take a while
because it's using content-aware fill.
It's gonna take up to 40 seconds
because it's gonna have to apply this new way
of erasing the spots on every photo.
But this way I can show them to you without any spot.
Okay, so this has all been synchronized.
Now I gonna really appreciate the photo a little bit better
with just a bit of contrast.
Now I don't like this photo.
I mean, it's a good photo,
but I don't like it because it was shot too early.
And I wanna show you how timing is everything for landscape.
So this is when the sun is a little higher
and boom we go a bit later.
The sun is almost touching the horizon.
I kind of like it.
I wish it would be more clouds.
I wish she had an ND filter, my wife, but she did not.
So I kind of like this one.
I zoomed in with her just to get the sun falling down.
It's an okay photo, but it's not great.
And then check this, what happened?
So the sun goes behind the horizon
and the light gets boring again.
So we go from a good light to a boring light, okay?
Then it starts getting really dark
and her settings are wrong
because she's like at 1.3 seconds, F/22.
Of course I can always boost the exposure,
but it's too underexposed.
So I told my wife
and this is when she started taking photos
to do longer exposure and boom.
Four seconds at F/16, look at this one.
Now this one is kind of really cool
and on this one I did a bit of retouching.
Let me show you, I'm gonna reset, I'm gonna reset the photo.
So I give you a little trick if you hold
on the alt key on keyboard and you click on the reset.
Well I'm gonna reset it completely, right?
But then all the work that I did on the dust,
I don't want to lose that.
So what I can do is I can take a photo
where I did my dusting.
Press command+shift+C and I don't need that.
All I need is the healing, right?
I only need the healing.
And then I take this photo,
and I press command+V and it's gonna paste the healing
from the first photo to this photo.
Boom.
But you see this one now had one more.
I don't know where this came from
so I'm just gonna erase this one.
Had another one there.
You know, I like this.
Now we are at four second F/16 ISO 100, still ISO 100.
Stars are starting to appear.
I kind of like that.
Then it starts getting a lot more crazy.
So this is the next one.
This photo, I already erased all the spots here.
Let me take that off.
Now we're talking about, so sometimes
I told her to take a whole bunch of photos
and what I do is sometime I don't know which one to take.
So I'm gonna select all four or five,
which are very similar.
And I'm gonna press N on my keyboard
and shift+tab to go into something called the survey mode.
So which one is gonna be, I think my favorite is this one.
Why? Because the water was going away
and we start seeing the reflection here.
I find it interesting
because we get this really nice mirror.
So you see I already gave this one a two stars
so I'm gonna work more on this one.
So let's go on this one.
I think this is gonna be one of my favorites.
But you see how the lights, I mean this is, let me show you.
I can show you the WO file.
The WO file is very similar.
This is the WO file, okay?
All I did was I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna reset the tone.
So all I did was take the dust out.
I'm actually gonna take some more
'cause I don't know.
As it got darker and darker there was more
and more dust coming in.
Yeah, she really needs to clean her sensor really bad.
But anyway, so on this one I'm gonna do
the natural drama formula,
which is in this book,
which you can get for free if you just pay the shipping.
So I'm gonna open the shadow, bring down the highlights
and then I'm gonna do my black and white.
So you hold on the option, very important.
And you do the black slider all the way
until you get about 1% of darkness.
And then what you do is you do the same thing
with the alt key and you go all the way there
until you start seeing there.
So what you see here in like yellow and red
it's pixel which are at 100% black.
I don't want that.
So I'm gonna back it down, back it down.
If I hold on the the option key again here,
you see here I forgot to tell you,
but the little black pointers are pixel which are
at 100% white.
I don't mind having pixels
which are at 100% black.
But I do mind having pixel which are 100% white
because if you print this photo,
it's gonna be just paper, there will be no more information.
It's gonna print paper.
So I can see there's a couple more dusts on this one.
I'm gonna spend more time 'cause this
is one of my winning photos.
I might print this photo.
I definitely will post it on social media.
Think my wife really did something really well.
Okay, so sometime it's not working
like a dust doesn't go away.
So what you need to do is make just a bigger thing
and hope sometime you have to go to Photoshop.
You see on this one I might have to go to Photoshop
to get rid of it.
Let's zoom in on this one.
Let's make it shorter.
You want to make it big,
but you don't want it to touch the roof
because if you touch the roof, ah, it's not perfect.
Sometimes what you can do is do a second one
on the top of the old one to get rid of the spot.
Yeah, I think I'm gonna have to go to Photoshop
to clean that up.
Okay, contrast a little bit of contrast, look at that.
The photo is already looking amazing
On this one I want to do really the rule of third.
I think she messed up the rule of third a little bit.
You know, but she's not an experienced photographer.
I love my wife, and I love to teach her photography.
She loves it.
So 16x9, I want literally like one third of sky
two third of the pier and the water.
So something like that is good.
Okay, so now that I've done the basic exposure,
that's when I go into profile,
it's a second set of the natural drama
which is profile and color refinements and white balance.
So before I do white balance on this one
I'm just gonna take the landscape profile
the one provided by Sony.
You just go to camera matching, landscape profile.
And then I just play, I think the white balance is spot on.
I love when I shoot and I did that
for my wife to set the proper white balance.
You see so that I don't even have to touch it in Lightroom.
And if you do have to touch it, you can adjust it.
I just love that it goes from the blue to yellow
which maybe adds a bit of magenta, but that's about it.
Okay, the next thing that I want to do on this one,
I'm not gonna add texture or clarity.
It's very sharp already.
Yeah, she didn't mess it up.
It's very sharp.
I'm even gonna add a minus clarity
to give it a bit of a glow.
And then usually on this step, on the natural drama formula
I adjust the hue saturation luminance.
But in this case I'm really happy with the colors.
Like I don't think I can do better.
So I'm gonna jump that step.
And I'm gonna go step to number four of the natural drama,
which I talk a lot in the book is a dodge and burn.
So dodge and burn on this one is already very dodge
and burn.
We have a lot of highlights.
You know it's very dark here.
It's kind of cool.
The only thing I think I wanna make brighter is
this reflection.
So I'm gonna take a brush.
I'm gonna make sure my flowing density is
in the 80 and I'm just gonna add a bit
of exposure, 0.5 or something.
I'm just gonna add a bit of exposure just
to make this reflection pop even better.
And maybe I'm gonna make the sunset a little bit better
with another dodge and burn.
So dodge means making things brighter
and burn means making things darker.
So I'm gonna dodge the sunset and what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna make a big crater where the sunset is.
I'm just gonna make things a bit brighter
and maybe add even more saturation.
Not too much.
You don't want any bending.
You don't want bending.
Bending is when you went too far.
Just a little bit more saturation just to make it pop.
It's a small thing. Okay.
And voila, I think I just wanna make it brighter.
I really like that.
And when I have a retouching that I like,
I'm just gonna select the last four photos.
Synchronize, check, all, synchronize everything.
'Cause I don't think she changed much.
And it's gonna take a while
because what takes the most time is erasing the dust.
You know, I would go in Photoshop and erase that,
but first I wanna see what's the best photo
before I spend time in Photoshop.
Okay, boom.
And look at this one.
This one is kind of cool.
We still have this problem with this dust here.
I'll show you how to get rid of the,
I'm just wondering which one is the best.
I think I like this one better.
So I'm just keep it two star here.
Let's look at this one.
So this one way too dark.
So because I copied all my setting
from one photo to the next.
So what you do is you hold on the option key
and you check your black point.
This is way too strong.
So I'm gonna lower it and then check the white point.
Okay. I can make this a lot wider before I burn things.
Okay.
And then you can boost the exposure.
It's already pretty good.
I think the photo is too magenta
so I'm gonna back that down a little bit.
And I don't like the gradient.
I think the gradient, no, there's no gradient.
We have something weird here.
I'm guessing it's a spot.
Yeah, it's a spot that's not going away.
It's always that spot here.
So you know what, because the spot is
in different place here, it's gonna be easy.
I'm just gonna make a big circle click
and that should get rid of that.
Yeah, that worked.
Okay, perfect.
Eh, I'm not crazy about this one.
I kind of like it.
I think it's too magenta.
Maybe add a bit of yellow.
It's really hard.
I'll tell you,
color refinement is really super hard
to get something you really like.
I think I'm gonna add a bit of magenta
something like that.
But again, I'm not crazy.
I think this one's gonna be better.
Yeah, this one is way better.
It's a bit too bright.
Look at this one. This one's amazing.
And then we have the same issue here.
Of this dust here, I can take this out,
but I think my wife did an okay job.
And you see the main thing I want to teach you is waiting
for the right light.
You see how much late we had to go, there was no clouds,
but look at that.
This is really a good photo for me
and this is really a good photo for me.
And they were shot really late.
So on this one I'm just gonna go to Photoshop
and clean up the roof.
So right click edit and Photoshop.
Little bonus tip for you.
Okay, so here we are in Photoshop
and what I do is I make sure you just have the layer here.
If you don't have it,
you just go to windows, workspace, photography.
That's gonna pull up the workspace that has the layer.
Or you can go to windows, workspace, essential.
Or if you don't see this window, just go to window layers.
If you don't have it, just go to window
make sure layers is on.
And then I'm gonna take that layer,
I'm gonna click on plus and I'm gonna take my zoom tool.
I'm gonna zoom in on the issue.
You see there's an issue there.
This dust doesn't go away.
And on this one I think I'm just gonna take the STEM tool.
It's gonna be really easy.
STEM tool, big STEM tool.
I'm gonna hold on the option key.
Click here.
And you see the option key is gonna say,
okay I want this pixel to be here.
And all you have to do is really align it to the roof
and you click and you drag.
And voila.
Yeah, this needs about (indistinct) cleaning.
I'm actually gonna do it really fast.
(upbeat music plays)
Yeah, I think that's good enough before and after.
And voila.
And then I think this one I really love.
I can't believe my wife to this shot.
Amazing.
Anyways, I hope you learned something.
I have an amazing video on 10 hacks in Lightroom.
Watch this video.
It's gonna blow your mind.
It's starting right now.
It's really some of the best tricks I use in Lightroom,
starting now.