Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV I'm Mark Wallace and in the
next two episodes I'm going to be showing
beginners how to take a drab image
and make it look really fab
using Lightroom Classics
developed module.
Now there are two things we really need to understand
when we're developing images
and one is that you can make global adjustments.
You can change the color for the entire
image. You can change the contrast for
the entire image. You can do all these
global things but once that's done you
want to hop over and do local
adjustments, do little fine-tuning
adjustments here and there in specific
areas of the image.
So we're going to do two episodes the first
all about global adjustments
and the second all about fine-tuning
those local adjustments.
So let's dive in right now.
Recently I had a great photo shoot in Bangkok
with a model named Am
and I think this image is the perfect image
for us to learn about global and local adjustments,
so we're going to start
by going to the develop module
and to learn about how to make
all our global adjustments
now right off the bat
we have too much information
on the screen.
One of the great things about Lightroom
is that you can hit shift tab
and get rid of all of these panels
it gives us a much cleaner interface.
Really we just need this panel on the right
so there's this little triangle I'll click
that this will pop out and we're just
going to use this right hand panel over here.
Now if I scroll down you'll see that
there's all these buttons and sliders
and thingies,
it looks like a NASA launch
control panel. It's just overwhelming
and so the nice thing about Lightroom
is that these panels are broken up
into sections or panels,
so we have a basic panel, the tone curve panel etc.
You know that it's a panel
because it has a heading and a triangle,
if you click that triangle,
it will collapse that panel or
that section. You can also right-click
and then just say collapse all
and that makes things look so much nicer
so much easier to understand.
On this right-hand
side here Lightroom has
compartmentalized things. The bottom
section down here is all about
the global adjustments, the things that
impact the entire image
and then up here these tools right here
are for local adjustments,
so for specific areas in your image,
so we're going to be working
with our global adjustments
in this episode.
We're going to start with
something called the detail panel.
This right here,
now by default if you are
shooting RAW which you should be
you need to sharpen your images,
so we'll show you that exactly,
so I'm just clicking on the image,
that's making it
zoom to 100%
Now down here by default
Lightroom is going to sharpen this to 25
which isn't very much.
Really this should be set somewhere between 80
and 100 so I'm going to bring that in to
about 80 and you can see that now we can
see the details in Am's eyelashes
and in her hair and so if you don't know much
about sharpening, don't worry you don't
need to learn all about this radius and
detail on masking just understand that
the amount should be somewhere between
80 and 100 you want to do that where you
can start seeing all the fine details in
the eyelashes and fine details maybe
you're shooting Scenic's in blades of
grass or leaves or branches things like that.
Don't overdo it, if you go too far
you can see that everything starts to
look plastic and really nasty. You don't
want to do that
and so we want to bring this into about
I'm going to leave it at about 80.
Okay well now that that is done,
I'm going to close this detail panel and
open up our basic adjustment panel.
Here is where are we going to adjust
our color temperature
and our tonality,
our shadows and highlights
and exposure so I always like to start by setting
my white balance.
Now you can do that by just
dragging this temperature slider
right here to make things a little bit more
blue, a little bit more amber.
You can change the tint
but if you're not quite
sure where this should be set,
you can use this little dropper tool.
So you click on that
you get the eye dropper,
go out somewhere that should be white
like the whites of Am's eyes,
I'll click on that and it'll set my
color temperature. Now luckily for me
my camera did a really good job getting the
color temperature right
so I can just click on
shot and that will set this
to the correct color temperature.
Its really nice.
The other thing we need to do
is set our exposure.
Now this is a pretty good start
but I think it's a little bit overall
underexposed just a hair,
so I'm going to
drag this slider to the right,
now notice this is a global change,
it changes everything, the entire image
so I'm just going to change this
by about plus 25
a 1/4 of a stop,
just to brighten it up
just a hair. Now I want to add some
contrast and make this look a little bit
more pleasing, so I'm going to start by
taking my black slider. It's going to take
all of the blacks and adjust those to
make them more darker or brighter.
So I'm going to make these darker,
just down here a
little bit so I'm about here -60 ish
something like that. I like that
notice how the contrast back here
in this city
looks so much nicer in this hallway,
so if I put that back where it was
that's sort of not so contrasty.
I bring it down to about 60
that looks pretty darn good,
but we have a problem here
and that is, now Am's hair is all blocky we
don't see any of the details
that's okay,
we have this shadow slider,
these are all the shadows,
so I can bring those shadows
back by going to the right and saying
hey I want to see some of those details,
I can do that about the exact opposite
of where my blacks were.
So I'm plus about 61, 62 something like that,
maybe even a little bit more,
so won't go up into the 70s
and so you can see that
we're really starting to get some
contrast here, it looks really nice.
Okay we can also do the same thing
with our whites and our highlights,
so if we want our whites to be a little bit brighter
or highlights to be a little bit less or
more exposed we can do that,
fortunately for us our highlights
and whites look pretty good.
Now here's one of the tricks
about these different sections here.
If you change something for example,
the whites notice if I change that way up
here I don't like it,
I just wanted to go back where the default is,
I can double
click on the actual word
and it goes back to where it was before,
same thing with the shadows, double click,
back to the default, so I'm going to put
that back where we had it,
which was plus 78.
Okay so you'll see me do that a lot
where I'm just double-clicking
to reset.
Now our exposure and our color is
set we can hit Y
it's a shortcut key
to see the before and after
and you'll notice right off the bat
things are already starting to look better
with our adjustments here hit Y again
to go back to our develop module
and kick this panel out.
Now the other thing that I want to do here,
we've done most of our
adjustments already our global
adjustments but one of the things that I
want to do,
is I want to add an effect
specifically the post crop vignetting
now why is it called post crop?
Well we're going to crop this image
and you'll understand that a little bit
better, so vignetting is a technique
to add either white or black
around the edges of your image you can use that to
correct a lens too as an issue or add
some artistic flare I'm going to pull this
all the way to the right so you can
really see what's happening here and I'm
going to take the feather all the way to
zero, so feather is something that shows
you what the transition is from your
effect to where there is no effect so at
zero is just a hard line at 100,
you can't really see where it starts and
stops so I'm going to go back to zero
here so you can really see this. Our
midpoint shows us how close to the
center the vignette should be or to the
edge and then the roundness shows us if
this should be round a little circle or
if this should be more of a square so
you have something like that
now you're really never going to use it
like this I hope not, well maybe you will,
so what we're going to do here is we're
going to add a little bit more realistic
vignette to this so what I'm going to do
here is I'm going to add an amount of
about a -30 ish something like
that about a -33 and you can
start seeing that and we have a dark
edge around here the midpoint we want to
bring that in so I'm going to bring that
Oh to about 40 ish something like that
and then we're going to add our
roundness that's going to be something
like that again around the 40s
so now you can see
that we have this sort of subtle
vignette around the side and then I'll
bring my feather back to where it should
be which is about 50 and you can see
that's really really subtle,
now these panels here in addition to
having these little triangles that you
can open and close these sections
there's also this little switch over
here you can click that to turn your
effect on and off so you can see sort of
what you've done so I'll turn this on
you can see the vignette brings the
attention back to am I'll turn it off
you can see that goes away so it looks
pretty cool all right one more thing to
do with our global adjustment and that
is we are going to crop this image.
I don't like that we have this little door
down here and I also don't like this
inside of em's elbow so we're going to fix
that by cropping the image so I'm going
to click on this crop tool and then I'm
just going to drag this up about like
that once I've done that I can also move
this around inside of the crop where
I've defined it. I've chopped off these
areas that I don't like and I'm going to
say close now notice our vignette if we
take the feather off, it's still the same
distance from the edges as it was before
so it changes based on the crop that's
why it's called a post crop it is
applied after the crop which is really
really nice in the old days with
Photoshop it was cropped off and so you
would have a vignette that would get
chopped off when you cropped all right
so there is our basic adjustment, we've
done our global changes we'll do a
before and after by hitting Y
you can see that we're this is much more
contrasty, it's much cleaner. You can see
all the defined details it looks pretty
darn good but there's some local things
that we need to do I need to do some
minor skin correction to this blemish
here. We've got a scar on the top of Am's
forehead and this little beauty mark
we'd like to change that
maybe this area back here add a little
bit more contrast and change some colors
in specific areas but that's what we'll
do in the next episode all right well it
looks like we have our work cut out for
us in the next episode we'll be doing
all those adjustments
to specific areas of the
image so make sure that you join me for
the next episode well thanks for joining
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