Hi, I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching AdoramaTV. Throughout all the
videos I've done over the past few months, if there's one repetitive point I keep banging
on about, it's to shoot your images in RAW file format. Simply, it gives you
better dynamic range, better color and more flexibility. But what I haven't really done
yet is to take a closer look at processing those raw files into something more akin
to a finished picture. And to do that we need to use a RAW converter.
AdoramaTV presents 'Stay Focused' with Doug McKinlay.
There's a number of products on the market including the ones bundled with new cameras but to get the best
from my files, I use Adobe Lightroom so that's what we'll use today.
Now I've got Lightroom 5 up on the screen and I've already uploaded a few pictures for us to look at.
Lightroom is indeed a RAW converter but is so much more than that. For professionals
it is the go-to software not only to work on the mechanics of pictures, but to keep
track of them as well. It's a fantastic tool for cataloging, especially when your picture
archive starts to number in the thousands. Let me just say from the start that
there is more than one method to do this.
Lightroom is a program that is flexible to how individuals work, so the way
I'm going to work on these pictures might be totally different on how others do it, but
done properly the end results should be pretty much the same. So let's get started.
So I've got Lightroom 5 up on the screen. We've imported some pictures
and we're going to work on one of the RAW files. The one I'm going to choose first is an image of a
cargo ship in the sea and it has a bit of a funny horizon going on. It's sliding off
to one side so I want to try and fix that to start with. So at the moment we're in the library
mode so we're going to switch to develop mode by pressing D on our
keyboard and then all the tabs will come up on the right hand side of the
screen and these are the tabs we're going to use to correct the photograph. Now,
people work in their own way. There is no real right or wrong way to do this. You can do it in
any order. Just keep in mind that Lightroom is a non-destructive program so it will
not be doing any damage to your pictures. We won't be changing anything on the actual file.
It's a copy. So once you bring up the lens correction box, there's two little
boxes inside. There's three little boxes, click the top 2 which will help take
some of the distortion from the lenses and also help with any kind of traumatic problems.
As I said before, the horizon is running off to the right so we want to try and
straighten that out and there's two ways of doing this. You can try the auto key in the lens
correction tab. It works mostly, but not always, so we'll just quickly reset the picture
and do it manually by clicking on the crop overlay at the top. It's a little box. It
looks like there's little marching ants around it.
And you'll see this grid come up onto the screen on your picture. Hold the cursor off to
the right or the left of the frame,
Press the mouse key and then adjust manually. And you can just eyeball this. This is how I
do most of my shots. When you're happy with it, if it looks straight to you then let it go.
Double-click and then your picture will come back up. Now from there I'm going to
close down the lens correction tab and I'm going to go up to the basics tab at the
top here, and these are where I'm going to do most of my corrections on this image
First thing I'm going to do is set the white balance - sorry, the White Point and the
black point so you can see the sliders, the white slider and the black slider. Hold
your mouse cursor over the the center of the white slider, then press the Alt or
Cmd, sorry the Alt or Ctrl key and click onto the white slider.
You'll see the screen go black. Drag the slider to the right, just until you start to see the
color come through. Let it go and that's your white point set. Do the same with
the black. Drag it to the left this time, the screen will go white. Drag it to the left this time until you
start to see the colors come through and that's your two points set. OK, now from there
what I do next is this particular image I'm not really going to worry too much about the
contrast and the exposure because it was shot during a fairly contrasty day but I might bring the exposure down
a little smidge, just to put a little more punch to it and from there I'm going to grab the highlights slider
just below that and I'm going to drag that to the left, pretty much all the way actually and that's
going to help with some of the cloud in the background. It's going to start getting a little bit
of detail in the cloud. Shadows I'm not worrying about, the clarity tool is the next one I want to use.
Be careful with the clarity slider. Too much of it and you can really sort
of make a mess of the picture. It's a mid tone contrast adjuster so
we want to drag that to the right a little bit but let's just go to about
around tenish. Now each picture will be different. You may use more, you may use less. It totally
depends on you as the photographer. Now, I'm not going to touch the vibrance or
the saturation because they look pretty good. So I'm going to close that. From there, I'm going to
close that and then I'm going to try work on the sky little bit. It could use a little
bit of adjustment so I'm going to use the graduated neutral density option which
is the oblong box at the top of the toolbars, double click on that and you'll
see a whole bunch of more sliders open up and that's where you adjust this but prior
to that, though, take your cursor into the middle of the frame somewhere. Click on
the frame, drag down. You'll see three little lines and a little black box come up and
that's going to help. That's the graduation tool. Now you can
adjust this higher or lower on the frame, anywhere you want. It's totally
up to you. You're... completely up to how you like it. Now I'm going to bring the exposure
down a little bit. Not too much but I see a white line sort of forming on the horizon a
little bit where the sky meets the sea. I'm going to drag the black dot just a little bit below that to try
to take that away. I'm going to add a bit of contrast. I'm going to bring the highlight slider down again.
I'm going to punch up the clarity just a smidge maybe just five or six. The next step then
is we want to do a bit of sharpening so we'll zoom in at 100%, click the detail box and we'll start
sharpening so you grab the amount slider, drag it to the right. I tend to start around 40 and then I
take it up in increments of five until I can't see it change anymore, when it
starts to look a little bit too much, so
around 50 for this one looks pretty good. I don't bother with the radius of detail. I don't think
it does a lot and this picture is fairly bright. It was a bright day when I took the picture at 100ISO
so I don't have to worry about noise really, but I see the seagull
here and it's kind of really annoying me, it's just not doing it for the photograph so I'm going to grab the
spot removal tool and I'm going to click on that. I'm just going to bring up this
little tool that's got two circles around it. One in the middle. One on the outside. Between
those two circles is where the feathering happens. That's where the computer tries
to soften the edges a little bit, so it looks a little more natural, so make sure your
tool is... the inner circle is just bigger than your spot you're trying to remove,
which you can adjust by either pushing the slider back and forth or using a
mouse. Click on the point you want to remove. The computer will then find a spot on the frame
that have similar color of the pixels, similar intensity and will remove the
spot. Once you're happy with that, close that off, zoom back out. You can go through the
whole photograph this way with the spot removal tool, trying to find little bits
and pieces that need to come out.
Personally I find the tools in Photoshop a little better so I tend to do it later.
Now if you're happy with the image the next part is to export it to Photoshop so just go
to File - Export and then your Export interface will pop up. You can choose a
file or folder where to send it to. You can rename it. Make sure its whatever file format you
want to export. I always export in TIFF and then later I'll convert it to JPEG if I
have to you and add any metadata if you want to. And at the bottom it says
post-processing after export and I export it to Photoshop. And that's basically it in a
nutshell. I realize this was a quick and dirty explanation on how to process your RAW
files but I encourage you to experiment. Release 6 is out now and has some new
and interesting additions such as HDR, photo merge for
panoramas and some interesting brushes to make the use of the grad filter that much better.
So that's it from me, I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV. Don't forget
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