In this episode I'll show you how to save images
using graduated filters in Lightroom
Adorama TV presents exploring photography
with Mark Wallace where you will learn innovative techniques
on shooting a wide range of photography here's your host
hi everybody welcome to another episode of exploring photography right here on
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well sometimes you're stuck when you don't have the ability to shoot at the
perfect time of day
like I am right now. I'm at this beach right here it's pretty cool but the sun
is not in the place I want it to be
ideally I should have the golden hour right when the sun is coming up, right at
sunset in a beautiful sky
perfect water but sometimes you just can't do that
well there's a technique in Lightroom that you can use to sort of spruce up
blaaa images, it's using graduated filters
so what I want to do first is take a picture of this beach
and we'll take than and throw it in lightroom so first let me get a shot
of this beach with sort of the blaaa clouds. So first I'm gonna take a shot
using my wide angle lens
alright I've got the beach and the crest
okay that looks alright
we can spruce that up in Lightroom so wanna do that next but before we do
let's check out this contest from Adorama
Well were in Lightroom five here and what I've done is I just loaded in this
image that I just shot on the beach and you can see it's just not very stand out
click out the side panel things so we can see a little bit bigger and
what I've done is I've done some adjustment using some graduated filters
and that's what our end result is going to be so before
after you can see it's much much more dramatic. Now how did we get there
let me show you so what I'm going to do first is I'm just going to click on the
first
image and then I'm going to create a virtual copy
and that way we have something to work on its not the original so we can compare the
two
alright so what we'll do now is we're going to go into the develop module
and inside the development module I need to do a few things
the first thing I wanted to do is show you exactly what a graduated filter
is. Over here on the right hand side theres this little square icon
and if you click on that you'll get this little dialog that pops open
and this allows you to create a graduated filter
now to start with I'm going to create one that has an exposure of -4 stops and that's gonna
be
very very obvious what's happening so overhear
on my picture what I'll do is I'll click and drag and you can see
right off the bat that this top area
is where the effect is beginning so this is a 4 stop
less exposure so I've taken exposure down by four stops
and when it hit's this line this filter is going to start fading out it'll fade out
all the way to the second line
and so you can also click on these lines to drag them apart
and that makes this and much less a hard
transition much softer transition where I can drag these closer together
and I get a very abrupt transition so that's what that's doing
and you can also click on these and you can rotate them
so that they're not exactly perfectly horizontal so you get the center line
here
and you can start making these crooked so you can align them to things like
horizons
or buildings or whatever you can choose how you want that
to get the whole thing and move it you click on this little dot in the centre you gonna
hand
you can move that, and then if you wanna get rid of it you can hit the delete key
proof away goes the filter okay now that we know a graduated filters is let's
dive in and start working on this
image and the first thing we need to do is we need to correct some things like the
color the shadows the exposure of the overall
image the global settings I've already done that and I saved that as a preset
so I'm just gonna click on my preset here and as soon as they do that bam you'll see that
this is a much more saturated vibrant picture
if your asking exactly what I did let me just show you here
I changed the color temperature a little bit
I changed the contrast increase the contrast change the highlight shadow
the white's
increase the clarity the vibrance and then I selectively changed saturation
on the greens
and then the luminance a little bit on the blue's here so I don't wanna go into a great
deal on that
because we've covered that in past episodes, but's that's what I did on the
overall
image but it still is lacking specifically the sky is lacking because
it's washed out
the other thing because of the time of day that I was shooting in
the left hand side of this image is a
more exposed in the right hand side so you'll see deeper blues on this side
and less saturated blues on the side so let's fix that with
a graduated filter so the very first thing I'm going to do is and click on
my graduated filter and then is gonna ask me what kind of effect
that I want right here you get this effect what these are these are sort of
their not presets but they are settings that will help you get started
for doing certain things like changing the temperature or the tender exposure
or contrast
so if you click on one of those, it'll already have your settings changed for you in as
a starting point
and so it doesn't matter which one of these you click on you can still
change anything you want inside this graduated filter but just to get us
going
I'm going to click exposure and I'm gonna make my exposure about one stop
less about one stop, and then what I'm going to do it I'm going to click
and drag to the right and you can see
that I'm making the left-hand side in this image
darker so I'll move this over to about right here
and I'm gonna take that exposure to about
something like that, so that evens out the image
so the left to right is exposed
more closely then it was before and so what we can do here to check that
there's this little teeny box right here you can click and it turns the
effect
off and on, you can see that okay we've
evened that out. Maybe I'll drag this out a little bit more to make that a little
bit less of an abrupt change
alright so we've evened out the exposure as best that we can.
ideally we would have shot at the best time of day but we that we couldn't
and so we did that what I want to do is now I wanna add another
graduated filter you can stack these on top of each other. So to do that
I'll close this one. So I'll click close
then I'm gonna open that dialogue again
and you can see that now we have a grade out dot. If I clicked on that would open up the last
filter
but I don't wanna do that. I'm gonna create one from scratch so this one
what I'd like to do is change the color temperature so I'm gonna go over here
click on temp you'll see that the color temperature is already -23
I like that is going to give us a little bit more blue so what I do here is I'm
going to click
and drag down and you can see that that is a very
a distinct difference blue here sorta blander, so I'm gonna drag this down
I'm gonna align it with the horizon. So I'm gonna put that right there
then I'm gonna tilt this so it's lined up perfectly with the horizon
that looks pretty good. Now I'm gonna make some changes here. I'm gonna take the exposure
down about three quarters of a stop something like that
and we're gonna at some contrast here just a little touch
we're gonna go in, we're gonna open up our shadow
quite a bit because our shadows are loosing details so open those up
round 60 ish 56 looks good. We're gonna go
add some clarity I really Like to add some clarity to my shadows
as gonna make that look very very punchy. I'm gonna keep going until I see that's
about where I want so
about 65 68 looks like it's gonna be good
I'm gonna saturate these just a little bit more just a touch
and then I want the sharpness to really pop out so I'm gonna bring that up to about
35 ish 34 so there we have a much much more dramatic sky
and I can see exactly what I did by clicking the this little button so this is
the graduated filters off graduated filters
on Wow what a huge difference now I'm gonna close that
the other thing that I don't like about this is it's just not horizontal enough
for me so as a final touch here
I'm gonna go to my crop tool. I'm gonna throw this in as a sixteen by nine
and then I'm gonna bring this in just a bit
and then we'll use the rule of thirds to make this look a little bit better we'll line
up that horizon so its level
and I think that about right there
is gonna do it for me so I'll just make sure that is square
the horizon in looks pretty good I'll take that
and then just like that we have gone from
a bland picture which was this one
so we had this sort of non saturated image
and we ended up with this it's a much much better looking picture if you ask me
and nasa graduated filters can help you out in a bad
lighting situation like we just had alright well there you have a graduated
filters in Lightroom it'll help your belly out when you have a situation
where your light isn't perfect like this right here
I hope you can use that I don't forget we have tons of videos at
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so do that right now well thanks for joining me and I'll see you again
next time
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