(upbeat pop music)
- I've always been interested in the visual side of things,
I think art and drawing was one of my first loves,
and then of course music, this is something,
just another way to express myself.
(laid back pop music)
Photography is just something that I think
always just kind of came easy to folks in our family,
'cause, ever since I can remember, there's been a camera
pointed in my face, so I know what I look like
at every single stage of life,
and I guess I have my Dad to thank for that,
but, later in life, when I was able to do it for myself,
I found it's actually something that I actually quite enjoy.
It's just amazing that animals actually have a personality,
I mean, he's like a little boy, he's our little boy,
and it's so interesting to see him grow
from one stage of life to the next.
When it comes to pet photography,
you want to try to keep the flash to a minimum,
and actually, I tend to just use natural light,
or if you are going to use light,
you kind of want to use continuous lighting,
so it's constant.
I mean, strobes are cool and everything,
but honestly, for a dog, or,
even if you happen to be using this
for a cat or something, they're easily startled,
and sometimes it can be distracting,
he might be doing something really cute,
in a moment you might have captured,
but then you have to reset,
and get them back to being engaged.
I've used techniques to show him
how to look at the camera,
I've associated it with food,
all about the positive reinforcement,
so you can capture these moments,
because he'll never be this size again.
All right guys, so just real quick,
for the tutorial piece,
I just want to show you how to up your photo game,
using in this example, a program called Adobe Lightroom.
However, you can do this on your smartphone
with certain apps, the concepts still remain the same,
you'll see similar terms.
Up on the screen you'll see a photo that I took of Disney
using a 50 millimeter prime lens,
2.8 for the aperture reading, that was kind of wide open,
allowing a lot of light to come through,
but it also allows for that nice blurry background
that you see here.
So I'm going to go a little bit into the details
about pet photography real quick here,
as far as the lenses, as far as some of my favorites,
I'm not going to get into brand wars, however,
I would say that the top three lenses for pet photography
would be the 24-70mm, that allows for some flexibility
with it being a zoom lens, with that,
you're able to kind of stand a little bit more stationary,
with the prime lenses, if you want to change
the composition, you physically have to move your feet,
and if you have a young dog who's not sitting still,
you're going to be doing a lot of walking around,
so a 24-70 adds a little bit of flexibility with that range.
Also, 35mm prime lens, I wouldn't go below 2.8
for pet photography, but definitely that's a great aperture
for a lens for pet photography, and then also,
the 50mm which is what I took this photo with.
So this was the raw file that I took of Disney,
and I'm going to basically show you how we got here,
this is the after, after all my initial edits,
so before, straight, raw, out of the camera,
and I tell you to always shoot raw,
when you do that, using that setting on your camera,
you allow for the photos to maintain,
the vast majority of this dynamic range
which is going to allow you more flexibility
when you're using your editing software.
So, just to recap, I'm just going to hit a few highlights,
some things specific to pet photography.
One of the first things that I did, when I looked here,
I thought that the highlights were just a little bit
too much for me, so what I went ahead and did,
was darken those up just a bit,
so you can tell that, just from here to here,
it's a big difference with the highlights,
sitting at around -22, and then I also
tackled the shadows, and I went ahead and boosted those,
so you can see the difference the shadow slider makes,
so I had it at about 33, and that was a good balance for me,
and I left the whites alone, but for the blacks,
I lighten those up a bit,
you can see the effects of the blacks
with his coat and everything,
see if we go extreme, and then again,
I settled in right here on 33.
Now, I'll get into the present sliders later,
but this is something that
I like to typically do in the end,
as a topping, same for the tone curve.
Now what I do is I go straight down
the Hue, Saturation, Luminance, you can pick each of these,
but I like the HSL slider,
'cause it puts them all here together.
So, what this is basically showing is,
I use the Selector tool, basically to kind of just show me
a, what's the color range that this is affecting,
hm, what is this, okay I see
the blue and purples are moving.
Here, et cetera, so what I want to do is,
I want to exaggerate his features a little bit.
So, basically, I took the lighter portion of his fur,
and I boosted the oranges and the yellows,
while at the same time,
decreasing the blues and the purples,
which are the darker portions of his coat,
adding a little bit more contrast,
and just really bringing out his fur.
Now, after that, I want to show you something
kinda specific to pet photography,
but also common to human photographs,
and that is focusing on the eyes,
so as you can see in the before, straight out of the camera,
this is kind of a flat image,
not much luster coming off of his eyes,
but once we edited them,
it looks a little bit more polished,
and the reason for that is,
I'll kind of show you, what I did with the brush tool here,
this red area is basically showing you the affected areas,
and basically what I did,
was I boosted the clarity in his eyes,
and raised the exposure just a tad, just .5,
to add a little bit, and then also, on those catch lights,
on the catch lights in his eyes,
I also boosted the exposure just a little bit
to add a little shine.
So, before and after.
Additionally, for his fur, you can see the red area
is the affected area, and essentially,
it's something specific for pet photography,
with all of their fur, you want the details
to shine through, so I boost the sharpness,
by 33, a lot here, and a little bit on the clarity,
not much, you can take this too far,
to just add to this image,
and one of the last things
that I did with regard to filters anyway,
was I added a radial filter,
and basically what that is doing, this big circle here,
basically everything in here's a filter,
so it's not affected, but I wanted the focus
to be on his face, so this red area is showing you
what I basically affected out here,
so everything outside of his face,
I added just a little bit more, I reduced the sharpness,
so basically I made it more blurry down here,
and then I dropped the shadows, so right away,
you're just going to just gravitate towards
the center of his face, and then by boosting the exposure
and the clarity in the eyes, definitely hopefully
the viewer would want to be drawn to that as well.
So, that's what I did there, I also lightened the shadows
a little bit in his tongue, you see before,
it's just a little bit dark, and then after if you want
you can kind of take your time and take this into Photoshop,
you can remove some of this stuff right here
or any weird things on the photo,
like a little bit of his collar and leash
are shining through here if that bothers you,
but this is just a basic overview,
of some of the things I do, so in the end,
after all those corrections, I go back down
to my overall presence, I boosted the vibrance just a bit,
you can see what difference that makes, overall,
I mean if you reduce it all the way,
it's almost like it's black and white,
I think I had it about 19,
there, and I reduce the saturation
just a little bit so you can see what happens,
if you have a little bit too much, so, like so,
so that's kind of extreme.
So I had it at -4, there we go.
And then I have a safe tone curve,
so basically generally speaking,
you want to kind of do like an ess curve here,
this is my Disney point curve,
to just kind of get him right
and for me, that's it, that's a quick edit,
that's what I would do to make this photo, and from there
you can just export this image low-quality for the internet,
it's fine, but definitely
you want to look into your settings
if you want to print this out,
but that's basically how I would edit this photo.
Thanks so much for tuning into this channel,
please like, comment and subscribe,
and we will see you in the next tutorial.
(happy pop music)