(upbeat music)
- Hello friends.
This is Chris Orwig.
I'm a Sony Artisan, photographer, author, and teacher.
For this tutorial, I want to take a look at
how we can process and improve an image from start to finish
using Lightroom and the develop module.
The photograph that we'll be working on is this one here.
This is a photograph of an artisan that I met
and what I want to do is I want to clean up the image,
remove a few of the objects which are distractions
and then improve the overall color tone and details.
I want to do a start to finish on this bad boy.
All right, here we'll go over to the basic panel,
inside of the basic panel,
I'll start off by bringing up my exposure
and next bring up some contrast as well.
As I start to bring up the exposure, at least for me,
I realized the image was a little dark
and I'm gonna go for a brighter,
a little bit more of a pale color palette too.
So it's gonna be brighter so shadows are coming up.
Highlights are gonna drop down.
And then blacks I'll bring down as well.
Now as far as the color goes,
I am gonna bring up my temperature slider
so that will bring in some more warmth.
And I'm doing this just to eye, just the way that I like it.
It's not about it being color correct,
it's more about having a mood or feeling.
The image looks somewhat normal at this point
but I'm going to stylize it a little more,
add some clarity which will desaturate the colors.
I'll bring out some more of the bigger colors
by dropping vibrants.
That takes those bright greens down and so
now we have a little bit more of an even color palette.
And then it looks like too much clarity there
and a little too much contrast.
I want it to have a soft, warm feeling to it.
Now if you want to get deeper into color,
one of the ways you can do that is is an HSL.
You have hue, saturation, and luminance.
If we go to saturation,
what we can do is we can desaturate the oranges and reds.
Those are colors we're seeing in the skin tones
and we can also go to luminance and brighten those up.
See how were kind of brightening up
the skin tones there a little bit as well.
All right, fine tuning this color.
Let's go down to split toning,
In split toning we'll press 'Option' or 'Alt'
and drag the hue slider 'til I find a nice, bright yellow.
I want to bring in more yellow into my highlights.
So I'm just gonna bring in some more yellows in that way.
And then round trip back to the basic panel,
maybe a little more brightness, a little more contrast.
Yeah, just fine tune it
'til we get a nice color look for the photograph.
All right, if I press the backslash key,
you can see here is before,
what we started with we didn't realize perhaps
was a little bit muddy, dark, and now we have this bright,
kind of yellowish type of look.
All right, so this image was captured a Sony a9,
85 millimeter lens.
So it doesn't have a lot of distortion
but I still need to go down to some of my controls here,
I'll start off with lens corrections.
I'm gonna turn on chromatic aberration
or turn off, or turn it on so that that's removed.
Enable my profile correction.
That removed a little bit too much of that for me
so I'm gonna bring those values down a touch.
Next I'll go into the detail panel.
In the detail panel, what we want to do is either zoom in
to 100% or we can look in this little window
and apply sharpening.
And the sharpening that I want to apply typically
is gonna have low detail.
Portraits have really low detail, like a beauty portrait.
This one's a little bit more textured
so I'll bring that up a little bit there.
And noise reduction, that will help me deal
with some luminance or brightness noise reduction
and then remove a little bit of the
color noise reduction as well.
Now, one of the things I'm seeing is there
a little bit of chromatic aberration.
It's green, kind of glowing edges back here so I'm gonna go
back to my lens corrections and fix that
with the eye dropper, I'll sample on that color
so it's kind of the green color right there.
So that now these sliders are correcting that little issue
that I had and it's removing that from that area.
I can't really zoom in any farther than this
but I don't know if you can see it
but it did really fix that nicely for me.
All right, next I'll zoom out so I can see the whole image.
I'm gonna add a little bit of film grain here,
so I'm gonna go into the effects the amount
add just a touch of film grain there
to give it a nice feeling.
All right, well now that I've done all of this
I want to do my retouching.
And retouching in Lightroom is really easy.
We have a tool which is called the 'spot removal tool.'
It's right here, you can either click on it
or press the 'Q' key.
Then you have the ability to clone or heal.
I'm gonna do some healing 'cause that blends things
in a little bit better.
I'm just gonna paint over with a brush,
this area which I want to get rid of
and then I'll change my source area,
just make sure that's lined up nicely.
I'll move over to the cup over here, paint over that
and again just make sure that it's lined up pretty well.
And I'll go over to this area too.
If you have smaller objects you may want
to use an even smaller brush,
that sometimes can help you get even more exact results.
If you find this overlay distracting,
press the 'H' key, that allows you to hide it.
You can change your brush size.
Right bracket is bigger, left bracket is smaller.
And when you hide the overlay graphics, you can then clone
or heal on top of an area you already worked on.
This can be really helpful so that you can remove
any unwanted pattern or repeating patterns
so you can sort of clean this up.
If you make a mistake like I have here,
just press the 'H' key and then you can click through your
various adjustments like I'm doing here
until you can find the adjustment.
This one looks like I need to fix right there
so I'm gonna go ahead and delete that
and then I'll go back and I'll redo this right here.
It was sampling in or pulling in content from an area
which just didn't look very good.
All right, well there you have it.
We have now finished this photograph.
I'll close that out there.
Press the backslash key to look at the before
and then now you can see the after.
The hope with this tutorial was just to show you
a simple step by step walk through of how I would use
Lightroom in order to process an image from start to finish
to clean up the details but also add a little bit of style
and color and tone to improve the image
like we've done here.
All right, well there you have it;
our before, and then now, the after.
Thanks for joining me in this tutorial.
I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
Bye for now.