(upbeat music)
- [Instructor] Hello and welcome to this episode
of Denny's Tips.
In this tutorial you'll learn how to even out the tones
and colors of your photo.
A lot of times, especially with real estate photography
you'll try and fix your white balance
and it will work on one side of your photo
but the other side is completely off.
Or maybe you're trying to fix your brightness.
One area will look good,
but the other will get either under or overexposed.
This is when you need to selectively
even out the tones and colors.
The before and after difference is dramatic.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to quickly
and easily even out the tones and colors
in your photo using either Adobe Lightroom
or Photoshop's Camera Raw Filter.
(gentle music)
First of all it's best to shoot your photos in RAW mode.
This is because RAW files give you way more leeway
especially when it comes to white balance.
When you open RAW files in Photoshop,
you'll automatically open it in Adobe Camera Raw.
But if you only have JPEGs to work with
you can still open it in Photoshop.
Simply right click on your layer,
choose Convert to Smart Object.
This will let you use the Camera Raw Filter
as a smart filter which essentially let's you go back
and change your settings anytime you like.
You can find your Camera Raw Filter in the Filters menu.
Keep in mind that this is just giving you access
to your camera raw tools.
But the results won't be as same as what you get
if you were to edit in the actual RAW file.
The first adjustment that we're going to make
is not actually the white balance or exposure,
it's the lens profile which you can find
in the Lens Correction area.
Check my Enable Profile Correction option
and it will automatically correct the distortion
and vignetting.
This will only work if Adobe has a profile for your lens.
If not, you can go into Manual settings,
and adjust it manually.
For mine, I'm going to reduce the amount
of distortion correction
because the profile tends to overdo it for my lens.
So why are we doing this as a first step?
It's because most lens produce vignetting,
which is the darkening of the outer areas of your photo.
This lowers the overall brightness.
Sometimes your photo is properly exposed,
but it looks slightly underexposed
because of the vignetting.
So by correcting the vignetting first,
we can more accurately fix the exposure afterwards.
Next, adjust the exposure and white balance
as you normally do.
For the exposure, simply adjust the Exposure slider.
If your photo's white balance is completely off,
it will be hard to get the correct exposure.
So in that case, fix the white balance first.
For the white balance,
you can use the White Balance Tool here,
and click on an area that should be neutral color.
But for photos like this one,
it feels like you can never get the perfect white balance,
and that's because of mixed lighting.
We have warm light bulbs inside the home,
but the glass door on the right is casting blue light.
So for situations like this,
fix the white balance on one side,
and then we'll selectively adjust the white balance
in the next step.
We're now going to make some local adjustments.
Let's start with the white balance.
Select the Radial Filter Tool,
and then drag to create an oval like this.
Next, right click on the dot, in the middle of the oval,
and select Reset Local adjustments.
Adjust the white balance,
and for my image I'm gonna make it warmer
by moving the Temperature slider towards the right.
If it looks like the effect
is being applied outside the oval,
make sure at the Effect setting down here is set to Inside.
You can also adjust the Feather setting
to control how gradual the change is.
Keep adding more Radial Filters
to balance out the white balance.
Here's how the image looks like before, and after.
Next, we're going to do the same thing,
but with the exposure.
This is great for the areas in your photo
that aren't so well lit.
Just like before, add Radial Filters,
but instead of adjusting the white balance,
adjust the exposure.
Keep in mind that this tool
will automatically use a previous setting,
so be sure to reset the white balance back to zero.
There's also no problem if you want to do
two or more adjustments in the same filter.
I'm just doing it one at a time
so that this tutorial is easier to understand.
And we're done.
To switch back to your regular settings,
click on this Hand Tool here.
If you're using Lightroom,
you can click on the Radial Filter Tool again
to deactivate it.
Here's how the image looks like before, and after.
Here are more examples of what you can achieve
with this technique.
This is a quick and simple way to improve your photos.
It's good for things like typical real estate photography
where mixed lighting is common,
and you wanna finish your retouching quickly.
By using Radial Filters you can even out the tones
and colors in a short amount of time.
(gentle music)
- Hey, thanks for watching this video.
If you liked it, please remember to hit the like button.
Now, some of you have been wondering where I was for awhile,
and in case you couldn't tell, I moved to a new place.
It's just a tiny one bedroom condo,
still trying to move in,
but hopefully once I get settled in,
I can get back into this routine of making YouTube videos.
By the way, if you do any sort of
real estate photography work,
check out my Photoshop actions
in the video description below.
It's a suite of Photoshop actions
made specifically for real estate photography.
There's one action in there that's really cool
if you shoot with ultra wide angle lens.
It's called the Volume Deformation action.
And basically what it does is it fixes the distortion
that you get with ultra wide angle lens.
So with ultra wide angle lens
things in the center look proper,
but once you move them to the edge,
they get really long and distorted.
That action reduces the amount of distortion
that you get with ultra wide angle lens.
Anyways, I hope you guys have an amazing day.
Let me know what you think in the comments below,
and I'll see you in the next video.
(gentle music)